How Google Handles SEF urls

Possible issues with masking a dynamic url

[PaulPA]

For my first post to WebmasterWorld, I would like to gather some insight from the "pros" regarding shifting from a static to dynamic site and how Google may handle this. There are certainly many issues when making this move but I’d like to limit this post to the masking of dynamically generated URLs.

Here is my situation. My site is a top site in a category and receives over 3000 unique visitors a day and probably about 10,000-15,000 page views per day. It is generally a top 5 site in Google and Yahoo on some pretty good search terms Currently the site has about 200 static html pages. I am moving to a dynamically generated site using an open source CMS (PHP/MySql). Fortunately someone has developed a nice component for the CMS that allows for search engine friendly (SEF) URLs to the point that I can reproduce URLs exactly these now appear on the static site.

However I have a concern. Many of my inside pages are backlinked and many of the inside pages appear as the top result for many keywords in Google. As mentioned, with the SEF component I can make these pages look exactly like the static page (e.g., www.mysite.com/section/page.htm) but to accomplish this I will need to name the page as “page.htm”. My question is whether Google will think something is wrong if it sees a file extension of “htm” but in fact the page is a PHP page.

Thanks.

[Yidaki]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], PaulPA!

> something is wrong if it sees a file extension of
>“htm” but in fact the page is a PHP page.

There's no way for Googlebot to see the actual format of the page. If it's named page.htm, google can't detect if it's a static page or php.

However, it is possible to *guess* that the page is actually dynamical, because:

- PHP enabled servers output a

X-Powered By PHP

line in the header of each page. You could modify your php.ini file to suppress this flag by adding the line

expose_php = Off

.

- PHP *could* be slower than static htm pages. Since Google could detect the speed of a request response, it *could* think that either the server is slow or the static looking page is actually dynamically generated.

But i don't think that this would hurt your rankings anyway. Suppress the X-Powered flag if you're paranoid but don't get too paranoid over the rest.

[PaulPA]

Thanks. Not really paranoid about it but just trying to make sure that all the work I will put in (e.g., customizing scripts to make sure the url matches static url) is not wasted.

Regarding your second point about slower dynamically generated pages, from Google's point of view are there any problems or penalties for employing a compression and cache system such as using Zlib compression along with a cache setup such as something like jpcache?