I am a php programmer, and it has been accustomed to me just to use one single page for a whole website and just use $_GET to have each page like: index.php?page=register and index.php?page=login is that OK for SEO, or does each page need to be a seperate one? Anyone had any experience? Thanks
Hi clowes, It is not advisable to use a single page for the entire website. There are many reasons why this is not good for SEO: 1. Search Engine like small files. Having one big page will hinder the indexing. 2. The more pages you have, the more indexed pages you store in the google database. The links within your pages also contribute to PR (although not much). 3. When Search Engine bots visits your page, they do not pass you any parameter.. therefore, they will only see index.php which is nothing (if you do not cater a page for NULL page parameter).. Hope it helps
Ok thanks for the quick response. I will split the site into pages. I am confused however because some 'pages' only have 10 lines of php code or so. Does that matter?
hmm... i don't agree... to me, i think there's no difference. the search engines will only index what it sees - which is html. don't forget that php is interpreted by the web server and static pages are served to the visitor.
Correct, theirs no disadvantage (directly) by doing this, many dynamic sites only use one index.php file. The only thing your lacking is strong url's. ?page=register getting rewritten with mod_rewrite to register.html would look alot better and would be easy to setup.
Heck, this site as a forum only has a few pages (for example, tethehwthread page here) Do you think Google doesn't index them all and that NONE of the content from here is searchable?? Listen to mdvaldosta on this one, you'll spend less time creating one line for mod_rewrite than you will making tons of pages out of the one you already have.
It was a case of just copying and pasting which i have done now. Whatsmore is I've always had problems with mod rewrite and well this is both quick and easy. Thanks for the ideas.
Having a single variable is not an issue with Google as long as the variable is visible in a link that can be followed. You will need good internal linking, but it's not really a problem. Like mykoleary said, this forum runs mostly on one page with a single variable and it's very well indexed by Google. mod_rewrite isn't necessary with one or two variables.