Hopefully one last time....which pages are spidered?

[eggypiece]

I imagine there must be some threads on this subject somewhere...could someone please point them out to me?

What I want to know are the types of page extensions that are not valuable for linking from the technical standpoint of the search robots. I read once that the best reciprocal link is in an html extension page. What about a PHP, ASP, etc.

Please don't tell me "the best page to link to is the one that would be valuable to your customers" or some other cliche like that...I'm not looking for the subjective human factor here, just the objective cold hard facts as to which pages are spidered and which aren't.

Thanks!

[mcavill]

File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.

[google.com...]

I've got a backlink that is indexed from someone's word (.doc) document. PHP and ASP are fine for sure. If they can index it, and it links to you, it's (probably) good :)

[SEOGirl]

I didn't actually see "php" on Google's list. So, this file extension is OK in terms of obtaining a benefit to having a link back to your site on a page with this extension?

The reason I ask is that I've been told that websites which have a links page that's dynamically generated are not able to be spidered (for obvious reasons)and therefore cannot obtain page rank. The only problem is, I don't know how to tell if I'm looking at a dynamically generated links page or not. Is there a particular file extension which gives this away?

Any clarification would be appreciated!

[mcavill]

I'd try a quick search in G for .php (or whatever extension you're looking at) have a click around a couple of the top listed sites, see how many pages are indexed (and the extensions of those pages), see if they link out to other domains.

Then try searching for those domains that have been linked to in G (www.thatextensiondomainname.com) to see if G lists pages that do not have html extensions in the "contains the term" or "links" lists (I know Google doesn't show all the links out, etc, but over a few sites it should give you an idea).

Hope that helps....even though it's not on the list, PHP links are fine (although I'm an ASP man :p), as are links pages with dynamic URL's (as long as there are not a lot of variables).

[grandpa]

The reason I ask is that I've been told that websites which have a links page that's dynamically generated are not able to be spidered (for obvious reasons)and therefore cannot obtain page rank.

I have many link pages (maybe 60?) that are dynamically generated, spidered regularly, and a lot of those can be found in the top 10-20 results. The Page Rank is ho-hum, but it is there and is directly a result of inbound links, not the page type.

PHP (dynamic) pages begin to run into problems when you start adding parameters to the basic URL, from what I can tell. My pages are simply named page.php, and by using mod-rewrite I make them appear as page.html. The mod-rewrite is not necessary for these pages, I use it so all my pages appear to be of the same type.

[SEOGirl]

Thank you very much, yes this helps quite a bit. I will do a bit of looking around on G to glean more about how these file extensions are indexed. I'm glad to know that dynamic database link pages are OK for being listed in, it seems so many use them. Maybe I need to get with the times, but I still do mine by hand. :-)