keep your variables clean and use a consistent order use mod_rewrite if you wish, but google's clever enough to work stuff out anyway. avoid session IDs in links - even though google can get round them, other engines can't yet. All database driven sites have an advantage in the SERPs, and any server side html you can put in 'on the fly' will help make pages unique and SEO friendly
Looks like you've gotten quite a bit of information, some of it good, and some of it bad. To summarize for you: PHP does not hurt your SEO at all. There is no difference whether a page was generated by PHP or HTML However, in the URL, you'll want to pay particular attention to a few things... 1.) Make sure there are no more than 3 parameters in the URL 2.) Make sure the parameters are always in the same order. (or Google may index it twice, then penalize you for duplicate content) 3.) Avoid session IDs in the URL. (normally by forcing cookie usage) 4.) You can use mod_rewrite to replace generic parameter keys with dynamic key phrases (for example, you can replace "product_id=46" with "widget") in order to help with SEO. You can also replace the '?', "=" and '&' characters in a dynamic query string with '/', to delimit parameters, however this is more for cosmetic appearance than for actual SEO value.
This is a great discussion and something I 've been curious about for a while now. So, if you don't mind, can you guys clarify a few things for me. 1) The php code sends instructions to the webserver which then generates HTML and sends back to the browser. Are you saying that the googlebot sees the html-generated code and not the code before it is sent to the webserver for parsing? 2) Lets say, for example, I have 100 articles that are in a database on my webserver. Through a php coded page, the client (browser) sends a request to the webserver and based on that request (a certain variable), the webserver displays a specific article to the client (browser). Will the googlebot be able to index all of these articles? Thanks again for a very informative thread.
DP is not trying to market a product or a particular page its made simply for chatting, this thread for example showthread.php?t=441664 the url for the page has nothing to do with the thread subject but the title and other page elements make up for this. On the other hand if you where running a shop without seo friendly url's you could lose out bigtime to your competitors. Relevant url helps your page rank well.
as long as you set your seo the way you want PHP is better because its dynamically generated. You can put blog post tags into the meta data for instance. Don't have to worry about page titles either.
It makes no difference if a site is selling a product or not. Dp is still in a highly competitive niche and it still ranks very well. Relevant URLs help your pagerank? I don't even know what a relevant URL is, But only backlinks help pagerank, Nothing else.