Penalized for having an index.php page?

is .html prefered over .html as an index page?

[Mark5]

Am I being penalized for having an index.php page instead of an index.html?
My first page is index.php. When I access it with my url www.example.net without including /index.php my PR is not even acknowledged. If I use the url www.example.index.php our PR is 0. The same content is on another url that had set dormant for quite a while www.exampleinc.com/ and it gets a PR of 4. Originally this site (exampleinc.com) had little more than a description and links to pages that had no content other than to say contact us. We changed hosting company and web developers so the original name was tied up by the old host, thus example.net was born.
The site has been up for 1 month and only the index.php has been submitted to google. The entire site is being examined by google regularly. Thanks for any help. Mark5

[edited by: heini at 10:37 pm (utc) on Dec. 6, 2002]
[edit reason] please, no urls per TOS ¦ thanks! [/edit]

[Fiver]

you shouldnt have any worries with a .php as the index - I'd give the site more time before worrying about it's PR. how does it rank?

just dont have both index.html, and index.php - especially with the same content...

[ruserious]

Some of our sites only have .php pages and we are still being ranked good anf have good PR.

The problem might be the following: Since the index.php is generated dynamically, there is very likely some dynamic, i.e. changing content there. So when google first goes to www.site.com/ and later through an internal link visits www.site.com/index.php it is getting two (slightly) different pages and therefore it thinks that your index.php is not your "root document" but one level deeper and therefore it gets a PR which is one lower. Because for me that is the case. On our sites we have

www.site.com/ - PR x
www.site.com/index.php - PR(x-1)

But this has nothing to do with the .php ending, but more with the nature of dynamic pages.

[heini]

Hi Mark5 - welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I guess the problem is not php vs html, it's a problem of having the same page on two domains.

You should probably take down the old site under exampleinc.com, or redirect it to the new site.

[EliteWeb]

the file extensions wont make a difference. google reads php fine. infact when it loads the root www.xxxx.com/ <-- the / being root it calls for that and whatever yer server is setup to send is what happens.

[Mark5]

Thanks all for the info. I'll put
your advice to good use.
Mark5