New site from scratch advice?

[php/sessions/arguments/structure]

[vincevincevince]

We are soon to start a new site, and want it to benefit substantially from Google's traffic. It will be a content based site in an underserved area of Google's index.

Being long time fans of php the initial reaction is to build everything dynamically around database driven pages.

This brings the question of structure:
1 - Use typically two arguments on each page
2 - Use sessions
3 - Use complex mod_rewrite to create virtual file structure and remove need for arguments

Which of these will be best for google? We will in any case be using .html instead of .php, as it looks better for human browsers.

Are there any other pitfalls to be avoided? Is our plan to use 8 subdomains of the site foolish, in Google terms?

[sullen]

Google is getting much better now at indexing pages which differ in the querystring. I have a new site with hundreds of dynamic pages (with 1 argument in the querystring) and Google has indexed almost all of them.

Sessions on the other hand can cause problems if you use session ids in the querystring. I don't know if you can use session cookies in PHP, but obviuouly these can cause problems too simply because Google can't handle cookies.

So in answer to your question - #3 is probably safest, but #1 should be OK too.

PS. also subdomains are not a problem, but be careful about duplicating the content.

[vmaster]

Kill session ids for Googlebot - they pose a security threat and cause indexing problems as well.

[vincevincevince]

Thanks guys :-)
My idea for subdomains is to target each sub at one keyword, instead of trying to cover all keywords on one site... but how will that affect PR, having backlinks spread out amongst subdomains?

[futureX]

it will spread the PR out among the subdomains as long as they all link to each other, which is in essence better than having one site with higher PR. Individual keywords will be found better :)

And the simpler the DB querys the better