Google and PHP

My sites have all been dropped when witched to PHP

[jonsag]

I was hoping someone could help me out. About 10 sites that I operate were dropped when I switched from regular HTML (non-database) driven pages, to Dynamic php pages. I have not lost my rankings on any other search engine, but they have all been completely dropped by google. Does google have a problem with PHP?

[Nick_W]

No it doesn't.

This is not the first time I've heard of a site being dropped when major changes are made though.

Still seeing the googlebot in your logs? Bet you are...

Don't worry, you'll be back ;)

Nick

[Rumbas]

Hi jonsag - Welcome to the board.

>switched to to Dynamic php pages

Does the URL's contain questionmarks etc? That could cause gb to choke a bit on them, but as Nick points out, I wouldn't worry too much yet.
If it's good stuff Google will pick it up again :)

[jatar_k]

Extremely long get strings or session id's on all of the url's can cause problems. If not possible to remove get strings all together then keep them as short as possible.

In my experience, I had one client that came to me after a web design company redid the whole site and used cfm with get strings. The main page stuck around because the url was clean. Second level pages had 3 vars in them and it only got worse from there. They took a site with around 1000 pgs ranking down to main page in one shot.

beautiful, the web design company then charged them a large amount of money to rewrite all of the url's to be indexable. A lovely scam that.

Keep urls as clean as possible and it is fine. From what I have seen I do not wholly agree with the fact that googlebot crawls query strings. It depends on the length, as I have seen over numerous sites.

[jonsag]

They don't have?'s, but I will check my logs to see if they googlebot has crawled lately. If I have 3 sites with unique content but similar tags hosted on the same server should that be a problem with google?

[Nick_W]

No, you'll be fine...

Nick

[jatar_k]

You shouldn't have any problems then. googlebot will remove the old pages, if they 404, then come get the new ones and put them in the index.

be patient. ;)

[jonsag]

Thanks again. Sorry to keep asking questions but I just realized that maybe the sites were removed because the content on just the homepages might be too similar. For example, I operate a large site for a plastic surgeon and on his main site which has over 100 hundred pages, if you click the link for "face lift" it brings you to a page that has identical content as the homepage for another site that is only 5 pages and is totally devoted face lift procedures.
The larger site is being listed and the smaller one is not? If I change the content on the small site do you think google will re-index it.

FYI, I just checked the logs and Googlebot crawled the small site on Sept. 16th.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.