I know the thread title isnt very clear, but simply, my question is this: I run a credit card, loan and insurance site and currently I have pages setup like this: Cards/badcredit.php Cards/goodcredit.php Cards/Bad/pre-paid.php Cards/rewards.php Cards/Rewards/travel.php etc. Essentially they are real physical files that are the same as every other credit card page, except for the MySQL query is changed to grab different types of cards. Is it alright instead, if I simply create a Cards.php and use a system like: Cards.php?Category=BadCredit and then mask it with Htaccess? Will it affect my SEO, is it good for SEO(Provided I have a sitemap that links to each of these pages)? It definitely seems like a cleaner way to do this and I would like to switch over to remove the clutter and crap of having many different files that I have to edit everytime I make a change to the site..
I am new to this forum and this is my first post. may not have indepth knowledge that you expect. But what I understand is, spiders relatively curse keyword and Keyword density more effectively on static sites then the one with PHP, as php are SSI.
It won't have much difference if you changed your file structure but if this change can ease your maintenance, then go ahead Search engines do not favor static over dynamic page. The only things you should take note when creating dynamic pages is to keep the parameters short and no session ids. To conclude, as long as these pages is linked up probably in your site, it will not affect your SEO much.
I went ahead and did it, all of the pages are linked up correctly and I used mod_rewrite for clean, non dynamic looking URLs, im hoping that I dont take a hit with my limited SERPs, at this point im in the sandbox I believe and I dont have a single page on google indexed, so I guess it really cant hurt..
Im not indexed, I tried the allinchor trick and I went through 60 pages and didnt find anything, I can only assume..