Non standard file types penalized?

Ranking advantage for .htm and .html? and implications

[chiyo]

In another thread at [webmasterworld.com...] , Brett said..

>> php pages rank lower than stock .html pages. Always have, probably always will. There are alot of tangible and intangible reasons for that from people not linking to dynamic urls, to just plain dynamic urls. That's true for all the nonstandard filetypes.
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Interesting brett and others, does this apply to asp, jsp, cfm shtml and php equally?

Also does it apply to a php powered page enabled by the .htaccess AddType directive which are still named .htm or .html?

and finally

does it apply to index pages where the url is just the domain or directory name without a file name and extension?

[korkus2000]

I think what Brett is saying is there are multiple factors to this. I think it also deals with the same arguement that .coms do better than any other domain extention. People are more likely to link to .htm and html then asp or php. Also sites that use other extensions are more likely to use dynamic pages which will hurt your ranking. I think the .htaccess route completely fools spiders so I think it is just like having .htm or .html.

I don't necissarily agree with Brett on this. I have seen PHP and ASP files rank just as good as .htm. Part of the reason we see .htm ranking well is there is more of them and most SEOs believe they rank better. This causes most really well optimized pages to be .htm. I think it is a self fulfilling belief. Most superior SEOs use .htm because they think it works better. That means all the pages that perform well are .htm.