? marks in page

Do they matter?

[stuart]

Hi all, Please don't laugh if my question is dumb as I'm working with someone else on building my site dynamically with php. I know? marks are to be avoided in urls but what about where they appear inside the page?

Thanks in advance.

[korkus2000]

You should have no problem with regular question marks on the page.

[stuart]

Thanks korkus2000, also for such quick reply.

[korkus2000]

Is this actually "?" the user can see or in the PHP code itself?

[stuart]

In the source code behind the page ie:

SearchResults.php?pagenum=2&searchstring=

only it won't be search results (sorry I'm not a coder), we'll have an online mysql database with all the required dir names, pagenames, product info; users will click on a category from an index page and the pages will be served.

Make any sense? I appreciate your time korkus2000.

[korkus2000]

So you mean have question marks in the link? That looks like a url. Are you calling an include or an iframe?

To me it looks like you are creating a site with query strings which includes the question marks. Are you using a mod rewrite? Sorry I am just trying to understand.

[stuart]

Hey thanks for this attention korkus2000, only I'll be getting confused soon and I don't want to waste your time; theres no iframes, no mod_rewrite (yet!), probably an ssi/php include for the standard site top/bottom menus/links.

The php code is aiming to serve spiderable pages from the mysql dbase which contains the required directory names / filenames for the urls PLUS the product info / title / metas etc for the pages.

My collegue is about to start work on the code but has no knowledge of search engines - I have no knowledge of coding. I'm worried any? marks or & signs anywhere in the source code of the pages will stop se spider's.

Make sense? Don't worry if I'm all over the track. TIA.

[korkus2000]

If this is your example SearchResults.php?pagenum=2&searchstring= AFAIK that is what you are trying to avoid. The links have querystrings, which actually are not that bad. That is the url that the spider will see.

[stuart]

Many thanks for you time and answers korkus2000, I'm alittle stuck in the middle of all this but making some headway now.