Out of these 3 extensions for web pages: .html, .htm and .php which do you think is the one with the most benefits in all aspects for a website (e.g. for SEO, etc.), not taking into account what content you plan to include in any particular web page? I think some pages must be in .php format in order to publish a particular content but what I'd like you to consider is the overall advantage (if there's any) of a particular .extension over the other(s). If one extension beats the other(s), do you think it will continue to rule for a long time, or do you think a tendency towards another of the 3 above mentioned .extensions will develop? Or... who knows... there might be a totally new extension that will replace all of these ! Any ideas or "underground knowledge" behind this topic? ;-) Thanks for your feedback in advance!
I have ranked high for both .php and .html All my content was hard coded, but I had a few scripts which were up the top and written in php
It pagefile extensions doesn't actually matter when it comes to Search Engine indexing, but rather it is how the URLs are presented. If you need your site to be Dynamic then use PHP, then use mod_rewrite to rewrite the page to HTML if you need it.
The days when html files ranked higher than their php counterparts are long gone. Back in those days, the difference was minimal if at all noticable. The biggest problem most webmasters experienced had more to do with GET parameter uniformity, and inclusion of session id's in urls. It's up to personal preference. I don't think there ever was a difference between htm and html. Personally, I now try to avoid parsing html as php when I can. Adding a parsing factor to html files can have an affect on server response times when your server is under heavy load. Another factor is what your users think. There are people out there who are suspicious when they see something besides an htm extension.
i'd definitely say .php = .html = .htm - i.e. they are all the same from a seo perspective. the only problem with php is if you have to pass in variables through the url - e.g. .php?var1=a&var2=b etc. that's wher mod_rewrite comes in. i'm no seo though
I will go for PHP , and do you known why?! because Google check the last update date of a filename... and if the filename is to old, your server will return a 304 error status... But if it's PHP it won't ask for the filename last modified data, you known why?! because .php files are dynamic files ... So you maytrick it a little bite, and make it think you update your content daily (especailly if you got some random text,etc).. but you won't be able to do it via html files,no?!
I was planning an experiment on this issue a while ago - although I never actually got around to it. If you look at google webmasters stats, inbound keywords to your site will often include the filetype suffix your webpages use. Hence, the .php (or whatever) is a factor in Google's algos. So, why not change it on your server, so that your files could have a relevent keyword and tell the server to treat that new suffix as a webpage (or dynamic). eg: www.domain.com/widgets/blue_widgets.php could become: www.domain.com/widgets/blue_widgets.free Hence, boosting your "free" keyword in any page specific inbound links. In theory.