Creating an HTML catalog

to go along with my php script based site

[Hubie]

Is this "bad" in googles eyes?

I have an ecommerce store with products...there's an option for me to create an HTML catalog of all my products (if they hit 'add to cart' they go to my script based age). The feature is advertised as "search engine friendly".

I was under the impression that google "didnt like" 'duplicate' pages.

Whats the deal?

[treeline]

Google doesn't hate duplicate pages. It just tends to pick one and ignore the others, not so bad in your scenario.

If the feature would really be of use to your desired customers I'd give it a shot. If you're just thinking about it to try and enhance search engine standing I wouldn't bother.

[AlexDuffield]

Google has no issue at all indexing PHP pages, as it is only PHP on the server. Once the user makes the request for the page (or the bot does) the end result is HTML.

Google does dislike long Ugly URLs so the real problem is the URL, not the PHP.

Use one of the many techniques for developing a site using "Clean URLs"

All my sites are dynamic PHP based sites and I very rearly use pages with "?page=catalog&product=spoon" type strings.

Instead I the user (and google) would see

[domain.com...]

There is no way google can tell this is a dynamic page.