PHP pages... never seen one site using them rank well

whats the point of using them?

[affiliatetracking]

When i type keyord phrases into google or yahoo, most pages that appear in the top 20 are html pages.. so whats the point of creating PHP pages? as i never seen any rank well.. maybe im wrong..

[wonderboy]

I have a PHP site with PR5 that is relatively new with few inbound links, I daresay that if it was established, with more traffic and incoming links it would be in the top 10 for good keywords.

PHP is also a more dynamic way to keep a site up. Some people make sites for more than PR and making a quick buck... Keeping them updated with relevent information is made much easier by PHP.

[jdMorgan]

...and URL rewriting can easily make a php page appear to be a static html page, so this may affect the research data you based your conclusions upon.

Jim

[yowza]

I have sites that rank well that use PHP. Of course, I've rewritten the URLs to remove all file extensions.

[affiliatetracking]

why did you remove the file exstentions? because php dont rank well

[m_shroom]

Robots do not follow links like (www.somesite.domain/?dasd=saas&jjj=23&y=4) very well, in php they are common.

[affiliatetracking]

so how do you rewrite the ulrs then so you dont get that happen?

is it a lengthly process?

do you use software to do it?

[jdMorgan]

Try a search [google.com] for some information on this and related subjects (approx. 457 results on WebmasterWorld).

Jim

[yowza]

I did not remove the file extensions because PHP doesn't rank well. I removed them because it looks neater and is easier to remember. I did remove the query strings because they do not rank as well in some cases. However, if I had left the file extension and removed the query strings, I believe the site would still rank well.

[paybacksa]

never seen one site using them rank well

Aye, that's the ticket. Keep em out of site.

[Symbios]

PHP pages... never seen one site using them rank well

ROFL, php extension to a page name does not make any difference in how a page ranks.

[affiliatetracking]

yes it does... its be proven that HTML pages rank better than PHP and get quicker indexed

[HarryM]

its be proven that HTML pages rank better than PHP and get quicker indexed

Where? When? By who?

[Symbios]

yes it does... its be proven that HTML pages rank better than PHP and get quicker indexed

I've used php for the last two years and had great rankings on some difficult terms, I've had pages crawled within hours and appearing in the serps the next day, its also been posted on WWW that php asp html extensions make no difference and MC from Google stated this at a conference I went to.

Looking at it from the search engines perspective they want to deliver relevant results and couldn't give a monkeys if its .html or .waz so long as they can crawl it and use the results.

The one thing that does have an impact on on using php is when session id's are used or extremely long urls with www.domaindotcom&sid=8798765tgkgku756i7tg or urls that use this with +gjgkj+gjkgghl

[JasonHamilton]

I have two sites that are 100% php. All pages have .php suffix. The first one has a PR7, and ranks #1 is about a dozen keywords. The other is newer, but already has a PR6 and ranks #1 is its keywords too.

I don't see any issue with using php.

[Symbios]

Forgot to mention, even though I don't believe that the file extension makes a difference on how well a page ranks its pretty easy to run php on html pages if you add a simple line of code to the .htaccess file.

[ExpLarry]

yes it does... its be proven that HTML pages rank better than PHP and get quicker indexed

FWIW google's take on the matter:
[google.com...]
(see last entry). php isn't specifically mentioned but I can't imagine it being treated any differently to asp etc.

My sites are mostly php but I mask to html for "aesthetic" reasons; the few pages which do end in .php don't seem to have caused google any problems and rank as expected.

[henry0]

My main site is business and news oriented
using PHP and MySQL
some directories are 5 directories down
and I still rank pretty well
Main reason: daily updates in static and dynamic content -7 days a week by 5.30Am it's update time!-

[carneddau]

Pretty much all of my sites are php and all pages have .php extensions. I've had no problems with any search engine, crawling or ranking. The php pages rank quite nicely in the top 5 alongside .html, .asp .whatever.

IMO it's not something worth worrying about, infact I quite like that my pages look a little different from the .html norm :)

[affiliatetracking]

well this certainly has been refreshing to learn.. thank you guyz

[paisore]

Most of my sites are dynamically generated and I always seem to get a good PR. I don't believe that extensions hinder google's results, it just wouldn't be justifiable.

[paybacksa]

okay, now before we get too settled in here, let's be a bit more careful.

Yes, Google says it indexes .php pages.
Yes, people can confirm that .php pages are indexed, ranked, etc.

But isn't it how you use them that is key.

Does a set of pages like this : mysite.com/start.php?index=1&type=45678?set=43?format=a (my widgets mainpage)
mysite.com/start.php?index=41&type=4543?set=47?format=a (my blue widgets page)
mysite.com/start.php?index=3&type=41123?set=43?format=a(my widgets warrantee policy page)

perform as well as the following pages would?

mysite.com/widgets/index.html
mysite.com/bluewidgets/index.html
mysite.com/warranty/index.html

Or, how about the following php pages?

mysite.com/index.php?category=widgets
mysite.com/index.php?category=blue_widgets
mysite.com/index.php?category=warranty

Sure, php pages get spidered and indexed. But is that really what you want, or do you want them to be understood and properly categorized for relevance?

As always, folks, it ain't as much about technology as it is about deploying technology smartly.

[jatar_k]

sort of true

which pages rank better of these

mysite.com/widgets/index.html
mysite.com/bluewidgets/index.html
mysite.com/warranty/index.html

or

mysite.com/widgets/index.php
mysite.com/bluewidgets/index.php
mysite.com/warranty/index.php

you'll have a very hard time proving any response on that and that is really the point here.

The real question here is "pages with query strings... never seen one site using them rank well" it really has nothing to do with php at all. The extansion has nothing to do anything. It is the lazy use of query strings and not using mod_rewrite to change them.

How about a thought, don't use GET strings at all, I've programmed all of my sites with out them for years. I use them only on pages that I either don't care about or don't want spidered anyway.

[chadmg]

First of all, your links should be:

mysite.com/widgets/
mysite.com/bluewidgets/
mysite.com/warranty/

That way if you decided to go to any extension those links would still be valid.

Secondly, just like .com's are the only true domains that are recognized by the public at large, most people only know html. So if any layman was to guess at your extension, they would probably guess html or htm, and might be confused by anything else. That is why sites that rewrite urls, do so with an html extension.

Note: I'm not saying that .php or .asp or .xyz extensions are bad at all, just making a usability point.

[paybacksa]

re: the ending / -- I was talking about pages, not links. Pages will have a filename.

So not much expected difference between index.html and index.php (or index.htm, index.asp, etc)

But my point was that if your pages i.e. collection of info unqiuely identified with a URI string, aren't also uniquely identified by a helpful filename, you are sub-optimal.

[carbonspace]

I've used fully dynamic PHP sites for the last 8-9 months and have found that its much easier and more efficient to create a dynamic site that will help you get 100-200,000 pages indexed much quicker than if you were to try and create a flat html version of each contextual page. The file extension is a trivial matter as mentioned by a previous poster. I wont get into that, but having my pages 'appear' flat and function dynamically has helped me get a PR6 on most of my sites. Don't belittle the fact that dynamic sites can help your page rank if they are used with some common SEO knowledge and a little effort.

[Webdetective]

What if I am using a script that creates a mini-portal and rebuilds html pages with new content? Is that as good as running php pages?

php pages do have the advantage of being able to run blogs, etc.. I did try an experiment with a dynamic title and heading that changes on my index.php homepage from a list of keyword phrases everytime you refresh the page or when it's re-spidered by a search engine, but this has not helped my ranking or traffic.

Does running a blog help much with ranking? I haven't had any luck finding one that's pertinent to my site, so I may not be able to use blogs for that reason. I could create my own blogs to run on my own pages.

What's a good free blogger script that doesn't take a software engineering degree to install on my own?
Fred