completely new to this

Expert opinion needed

[humpingdan]

Ive just been doing a little research into an area we want to look into exploring...

ive found a website that has a javascript redirect from a .htm page to a .php page,

the .htm page also has a number of <php include> statements built into the html of the page

the php page has loads of text few pics and loads of links to sister sites, ive checked and they all belong to the same person,

quite an intresting network,

could anyone explain to me what is happening though? just a brief insight into this technique?

[volatilegx]

Doesn't sound like the page is being cloaked... not if you were able to see all those links, etc. Sounds more like they just wanted to use some PHP to do something dynamic on the page, or possibly to generate headers/footers for the page.

[humpingdan]

is this beneficial to SEO?

[volatilegx]

Well the outbound links might be beneficial to those sites. Depends on a lot of factors.

[kovacs]

The php includes will probably just be for ease of maintenance. I do that myself - all my pages are .html, but I use php includes and have my server set to parse html pages for php, for including some things like common tables of links. He could also be randomizing links via the php includes and then inserting them into the .html pages.