Any reason not to use SSIs - Server side includes?

[gtate]

Quick question - any reason that anyone knows for not using these (from a SEO point of view)?

[rainborick]

Generally speaking, there's no reason to avoid Server Side Includes because the resulting HTML page looks like any other normal page to the search engines. The only exception I would make to that would be to do your best to keep the ratio of unique content to template content very high - don't use the same <title> tags or <meta> descriptions on multiple pages. Google seems to recognize cookie-cutter pages as low quality and they tend to rank poorly.

[gtate]

Thanks for that

[Oliver Henniges]

A few months ago I was helping a friend of mine, and I recall we got some problems getting his older SSI-includes run together with some very simple php-code, which I had written for him. But I cannot tell the exact reason any longer, there were some specific pecularities with his website, so this cannot be taken as a general DONT.

However, I would always advise to stick to as few principles as possible. Php is AFAIK the most widely used programming languge on websites at present, and if your static pages run thru the php parser, just put
<?php include('pathtoyourSSItemplate'); ?>
into your html-code. Works just as fine as SSI, and you won't encounter any incompatibilities between both environments.

The only reason I can imagine as a PRO for SSI is probably performance.

[g1smd]

I prefer using "PHP includes", as I can do loads of other useful things at the same time.

[Marcia]

Quite often PHP and SSI don't play well together, so agree that the best bet is to use PHP Includes which do the same thing without creating problems. That's good enough reason not to use SSI: for compatibility reasons.

[Oliver Henniges]

> Quite often PHP and SSI don't play well together

Thx for putting my experiences on a broader basis, Marcia.
I wasn't sure whether this was a general problem, so at least now I know it wasn't caused by my amateurish code;).

[Marcia]

>>don't use the same <title> tags or <meta> descriptions on multiple pages. Google seems to recognize cookie-cutter pages as low quality and they tend to rank poorly.

Agreed, and that's another reason to NOT use SSI, because it can prevent using PHP for things like semi-automating the use of customized <title> and <metas> for pages.

[gtate]

Thanks all for a very comprehensive reply. Tempts me to ask a follow up question - I've always worked on the principle that drop down menus are ok in CSS, but not a good idea in Javascript. Sounds like I might be out of date on this one ?

[tedster]

Google only uses the urls inside Javascript for the purpose of discovering a url they might not alread know about - those "links" do not pass PageRank or other ranking help the way a true anchor tag does.

[g1smd]

I usually use HTML-coded navigation menus (so they are pure links) with some PHP pre-selection of the URLs to show (avoids having display:none all over the place), and then CSS for the styling and effects.