Php/database driven pages and google

whats the deal

[twocats]

Last night, I went to a Php channel on freenode.net, which used to be openprojects. This is probably the best php channel on the net. I ask a question regarding my php stuff and they asked why I was doing it this way and told them "it was to improve my pages chances of being indexed by google , since google (search engines) didn't index php pages as well as plain html pages" and all hell broke loose. I was roasted, toasted, and bar-b-qued.
I had read that dynamic (?,$,etc) urls were bad to use, so to aviod them I wrote a hard links. I have a plain text html file (for printing and search engines) and I use php to load that file into a more graphical css template for those who want the pretty version of the page. The pretty page takes a bit to load as it is heavy in images. I have read that slow loading pages don't get indexed was well as fast loading ones.
What I would like to know, after all this typing, is there any of you who have real world experience with php driven pages. What is your experience been like with php driven pages or slow loading pages?
Thanks

[javascripter]

Actually, when I submitted to FAST, it was wierd. I typed in the normal domain www.flowerallie.com which was my html heavy ridden page and what it took was something different. It ended up taking www.flowerallie.com/catalog/default.php which is the dynamic shopping cart. It was wierd. It actually took the php without asking. So I had to go back in and say www.flowerallie.com/index.htm to make sure it would stick.

Ken

[instand1]

We had problems getting php-pages indexed in Google. So we removed the "?" in the URL. After that we got indexed.

[bnc929]

Google has no problems indexing any dynamics pages

.php, .jsp, .asp, .pancake, .coffee

It doesn't matter to them.

However with pages with a query string they know that you can easily write a script that produces millions of pages, and they don't want to be caught up indexing them.

So while they have never had problems indexing pages with query strings (a query string is anything that follows a question mark in a URL), they will sometimes limit the number of said pages that they will index from a particular domain. Likely one of the things they look at is if a page is linked to from a "static" page, and if it is then they will likely index it. PR is also probably a factor.

One thing you can do is create search engine friendly URLs. Not only will these make your PHP pages look static, but they will also hide which server side technology you are using (which can boost security and make it easier to change technologies in the future) and they are also people friendly.

I wrote an article on doing this:

<snip>

[edited by: NFFC at 3:30 am (utc) on Dec. 30, 2002]
[edit reason] No self-promotion please [/edit]

[Thanasus]

Google has no problem with PHP whatsoever. I have a website which contains about 40,000 different product pages. All of them are "product.php?id=xxx". After crafting a hierarchal sitemap, all pages got indexed no problem.

It has been mentioned many times around here that Google may actually favor dynamic pages

[bnc929]

fine, search on Google for "Search engine friendly urls" and you'll find articles explaining what you need to do.