Do .php extensions still hurt SEO?

Hi all,

I've heard that search engines had (have?) difficulty extracting content from sites with a .php extension. This scared the crap outta me because my entire site is php.

The more I look into this however, it seems that information might be outdated. On one website I read:

"It was once helpful to generate a static HTML version of a PHP page so that all the 'includes' could be indexed. Now search spiders 'see' all the content on a PHP page, the same way it is viewed in a browser."

So basically, I was wondering if you good people could sound off on this topic, and maybe assuage my fears. Thanks in advance!

 

I don't think this is true.

 

if you want to be sure about that try to separate the php files into another folder and just call it whenever you wnat to use it.

 

It is true when you have pages like these:

domain.com/index.php?id=123?content=345

People are using mod rewrite to convert that url to:

domain.com/cars/ferrari.html

The second is easier to read by search engines and it does included keywords.

Buy, a simple php page without variables as not less weight then a html page.

 

There are no issues per se with having a file end in php, to a search engine spider they are the same as html, asp, htm etc..

That's actually nonsense, an include is part of a page, like you might have a php include holding your header, footer, menu to make site wide updates of these page areas easier: update one file results in an entire site updated.

The search engine spiders and browsers have never seen an include when they access a page since php is server side meaning all the meshing together of the page (header, menu footer bits etc....) is behind the scenes before it's server to a search engine spider or browser.

I think what the author is referring to is issues with dynamic URLs. At the start of Google (all older search engines) the bots couldn't read/understand URLs including question marks ? (meaning they had variables). So a page like-

index.php?colour=red&size=small

Originally Google couldn't spider it correctly.

Eventually they added the ability to spider a page with one variable like-

index.php?colour=red

then pages with 2 variables like

index.php?colour=red&size=small

And now any reasonable number of variables can be spideredand indexed fine.

Wrote about this here http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/static-html-vs-dynamic-urls.html

So as the years have passed SEO advice has updated to take this into account, starting with only use one variable, then 2 and so on until use as many as you need within reason (I've seen Google handle at least 7 variables fine).

Only issue with sites that use URLs like this is spidering speed. Google assumes a site with dynamic URLs could be LARGE so spiders slower than a site lacking variables. Not going to have an effect long term, your sit even if large will be spidered eventually.

Beyond the above then we have session IDs, if your site uses sessions, usually you'll have something like &sid=74746hty9 in the URLs this can cause serious problems for search engine spiders.

For example every time Googlebot enters a site with sessions it gets a new session and so the whole link structure is changed.

If you do a site: search for a domain with session ids you'll find pages indexed multiple times (this is very bad) with URLs like-

index.php?colour=red&size=small&sid=1001
index.php?colour=red&size=small&sid=1501
index.php?colour=red&size=small&sid=1051
index.php?colour=red&size=small&sid=105
index.php?colour=red&size=small&sid=2309

It's the same page spidered and indexed 5 times, next time Googlebot hits this page it will have a new sid and so you never get a stable set of indexed pages, you also have duplicate content issues.

What happens is as the weeks pass the oldest sids drop from the index while new ones are added. You can never gain hard SERPs with a page that's like this!

Avoid session IDs, other than that there's no reason to avoid php files. All my sites run using PHP, even got some ending in .asp that are php files. Chose the wrong language years back, found doing a asp include easier than a php include (could barely do basic HTML 6 years ago).

David Law

 

I have a credit card website that is in PHP, i think im getting duplicate content in indexing by google, the place where i got the website allows you pick what language you want your site in, php, java script jsp and some others, what language would you recomend ? or does it matter.....as you can tell im new to this stuff.

http://www.industrycreditcards.com Maybe one of you awesome gurus can tell me if my site looks search engine friendly or is a mess.

 

if it hurts then how we can see our search result in google ?
I think more inner linking (eg:?id=ii&dsdsa etc) can hurt.

 

personally I don't think PHP extensions will hurt your search results and SEO

 

Google can crawl & index dynamic URLs without any problems, only issues that arise are with session IDs.

 

I think it is not true, because I have made my site pages with .php and they all ranked well in search engine.

 

yep,get rid of SSIDs and u will be fine. extensions like .asp, .aspx and .php makes no difference

 

Just to summarise as my first post as was long D)

The only BIG issue with PHP is if you have session IDs, if you don't have session IDs (normally seen in a URL as &sid=####) you don't have anything big to worry about.

Pages like

mypage.php
anotherpage.php

Will be spidered/indexed just the same as a page ending in html, htm or asp etc... (search engines don't care).

I have seen one issue with dynamic URLs caused by poor planning, not php itself.

When you have a URL like

index.php?colour=red&size=small

Sometimes the PHP script is setup in such away that some pages will show it as-

index.php?size=small&colour=red as well (so two forms of the URL)

This is poor planning by the script creator, not a problem with the search engines/PHP.

When creating a dynamic page using multiple variables it doesn't matter what order they are listed it, so these two URLs-

index.php?colour=red&size=small
index.php?size=small&colour=red

Will create the same page. For search engine reasons you should only use one of these formats, if the script developer hasn't been careful you can find they've added links to two or more versions of the same page. You might find on a category page that lists multiple products they've used this format-

index.php?colour=red&size=small

but on a product page under related product they've used this format-

index.php?size=small&colour=red

Google etc... will find both sets of links and index these pages multiple times (not good, duplicate content problems).

Again this isn't because you've used php, but because the script developer wasn't careful. I've seen this many times on shopping carts.

I've even seen developers use mod_rewrite for the main part of a script (this will turn dynamic URLs like index.php?size=small&colour=red into something like product-small-red.html) but then miss using mod_rewrite one small part of the script (like a related products section) resulting in both the e wrote version and the dynamic version being spiderable. Again this is a mistake by the developer, not a search engine/PHP issue.

PHP is a very powerful language, but can mess up your SEO just like anything else you use if you don't know what your doing.

David Law

 

better to get rid of them ,some exceptions where you can keep .php

But i recommend majority of your pages should be .html

Regards

Alex

 

Buddy instead .php gets indexed much fast than .html and in some cases it ranks more than .html

coz in some tests we found out that .php dominates when it comes to keyword positions,,,,,,,,,,,

SEO point of view PHP is much better

Go for php not a problem

 

These days all that you need is unique content and nothing works much faster than it

Just check the DP how many pages they have indexed ,Allmost every single thread is indexed

But still i prefer .html

Regards

Alex

 

I have used both html and php and I find that they both work fine. However, Php does seem to get indexed better and rank higher for keywords, which is a plus. The only problem is you have to watch for duplicate content and duplicate meta tags.

 

A php file extension will not result in higher SERPs except in one condition, the word PHP is part of the SERP, then having php file names will help.

Anyone who says php files are better ranked than html or the other way around are basing this on their personal experience, not a bias in the search engines algorithms. The search engines don't care what the extension is.

David Law

 

Great content here

 

i havent seen much difference with file endings regarding rankings... some sites are html, some are php, some use a directory structure only (like /webpage/) and all seem to have the same chances of ranking