Does Google like cgi pages

Will Google spider and rank high cgi pages? Take The Test Yourself!

[JoeHouse]

Here is a healthy debate. Does Google like cgi pages? Will Google rank and index highly cgi pages? I have put this question to several web designers, programmers, and optimization specialist and received different responses from each.

Here's a test for those who are interested in participating. Do a search on Google uses any keyword you like. See how many top 10, 20 or 30 listings you can find with a cgi link. My guess is not very many. So I ask again, does Google like cgi pages?

[Chris_R]

Google used to try and avoid all cgi pages - now they index much more dynamic content.

[google.com...]

Shows over a million pages under a cgi-bin directory.

I don't think they PENALIZE the rankings of these types of pages, but I do think they are less likely to crawl them.

[RBuzz]

Or you can do a search for <keyword> filetype:cgi and you'll find a lot there.

Remind me to do a hack that takes a query and compares the results across ten popular filetypes (html, htm, asp, cgi, cfm, etc etc)

RBuzz

[Chris_R]

That is the prefered way of doing it - I was trying filetype:.cgi and wondering why I wasn't getting any results :)

[Net_Wizard]

I have several page 1 ranking cgi pages often out of several hundreds of thousands results. Not only that, the URLs have the dreaded '?' and 'ID' on it.

I fairly come across arguments that Google does not index URL with 'ID' on it but it seems that my site have no problem with it.

[RBuzz]

Chris:

filetype:cgi inurl:cgi

:->

RBuzz