SearchEngines and PHP websites

I have set up a php website and want to know if search engine will index it

[pauly]

Hi,

Sorry for this posting as looking at the previous postings I can see it has been covered but I am not very knowledgable on search engine info as I should be and I have a few questions.

Basically my site was html and with around 300 pages if I made one change to one page I would have to edit the other 299. I decided to go with the PHP method. I now have one main template page and the rest are content pages which are loaded via that one,

IE, [domain.com...]

My question is how search engine friendly is this method? My site is updated five times per day which is why I opted for the php method and then thought of the search engine repercussions second.

I have heard this method is now okay with search engines as they can now index these without a problem, is this true?

One more thing I was getting a ton of hits from google/yahoo with various pages. I removed them from my server because I was updating with new ones. I'm now not getting hardly any hits from the search engine now. Is there a method anyone uses when in this situation other than keep the page up for the rest of eternity?

If the PHP method I mentioned above is going to make my site un-penetrable by search engines then how can I change this (with as little work as possible) so search engines love my site again?

Sorry for the mega long post, when I get going...

Thanks,

Paul

[Knowles]

Yes Google will index a PHP page.. they say its best to not have a session ID in the address though.

[ciml]

Some people, including I, go to a lot of trouble to keep ?s out of their dynamic pages. It makes deep spidering more likely, and there is a belief that links to or from pages with ? in the URL get less weight.

On the other hand, plenty of people who have sites with ?s in the URLs get crawled deeply and have good rankings.

You should make sure that the old addresses have good 404 error pages to guide visitors into your site, and that any links from other pages to the old addresses are changed.

[enotalone]

hi, Pauly
from my own experience dinamic urls are not a problem at all when in comes to ranking in google. i used to serve more than 10.000 pages with a single index.php. and most of them ranked very well, but see there was always this thought in my mind that i should go step further to better target google and other SEs with static pages, so i did major application redesign and programming all the back end so that they generate static .html. overall, my ranking in google did not improve much, but i get better coverage from other search engines. all the .html pages are based on the single back end, template and cache engine so updating a single file can reflect the change across the network and the cache of the pages will be regenarated. what i want to say is that there are simple technologies that can help you to base your content and html on templates. so you dont have to edit hundreds of pages to make a change. check out fast template or smarty template engine which has a strong cache functions too. i have tested about a dozen template and cache engines and i adopted smarty because it both cache and template. i was little afraid how would google react to template based files, but google bot has no problem with it at all.

for the back end to genarate static and integrate all the elements and services into one i use dirthsearch; a wonderful application, has not been updated for a year or more but is very powerfull, much much better than nuke or anything else i have seen. it cant generate static but i have modified it and works fine.

[pauly]

Hey,

Thanks for all the information people :)

Paul