I know the page title may be confusing but my questions is basic... I have a site, thats in reality quiet large but its all run from one file...Index.PHP, it starts with one drop down containing US States, once a state is selected the page reloads in the following format: index.php?State=TheStateSelected and a second drop down shows up below the first with Counties from the selected state and once an item is selected the page reloads again with the following format: index.php?State=TheStateSelected&County=TheCountySelected and then results are displayed through that... This is accomplished using PHP...$_GET, If statements, isset and so forth. My question is, is this alright for SEO? Ive tried using XML-Sitemaps but it only creates a Sitemap.XML with the index.php in it...
The SE bots will not be able to follow your drop down menu and index all your dynamic pages from it. You will need to create a page, or pages, with static links to all the possible pages. Call it a site map if you wish. If you made one page per state you could add some descriptive content describing what can be found on the pages for each county in the state. Then a bunch of static text links to each county page. This makes it more of a content page than simply a sitemap. Place a static link on your home page to a page with all the state links, or place all the state links in your footer of home page.
So, your saying that I can make a static file with links to the states that are still simply index.php?State=California ? For example, it would be... <a href="index.php?State=California">Realtors in California</a> for each state,all in one file?
Google (at least) will count your page as one page, not many. I have a database of 6615 cities where we market, and we put relevant rates on each page, but even with the different rates it got supplemental listed on Google (very high but still supped). On some SEs we pull very good rank and all the cities pages index. We have asked Google and they recommended putting unique content on the pages, because the numbers, constituting rates in our case, aren't enough unique content compared to other text which is the same regardless of rates. I can give more detail if anyone is interested, but that's it in a nutshell. Be$t of luck.
Yes, and you can use mod_rewrite to rewrite the URL's so they look like domain.com/California, or domain.com/California-Realtors instead of domain.com/index.php?State=California check this thread for mod_rewrite help http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044&highlight=mod+rewrite