page names and how php can effect it

questions about php pages and their names

[milkweed73]

Hi, newbie here :)

My name is Ray, and I run a medium website running PHP, MySQL, and CSS. I am having alot of problems getting higher rankings on the search engines and I have some Q's regarding this.

I have page names such as these:

health.php
training.php
cartoons.php

and more heavily scripted pages like:

breed_list.php?type=ukc&group=7
breed.php?id=1

Now my question is this. Will renaming pages like health.php to dogs_health.php, help alot in page relevency? Dogs is obviously my main keyword I am trying to work with.

I do HTML, CSS, graphics, and content, a friend does our PHP and SQL. He is telling me we can rename breed_list.php?type=ukc&group=7 with dogs/ukc/terriers/bull_terrier/ no actual page extension. Will those subcategories help things? Can they hurt things? Will the lack of an actual page such as dog.php at the end hinder anything? I do not want to trick the SE's only make them see the actual relevency of each of my pages.

I apreciate your help and time, thank you.

Ray

[marek]

Keywords in URL are quite important on page factor and can improve your ranking, when used reasonably, with users in mind. However be aware, that uderscore is not a keyword separator, so e.g. "dog_health.php" contains neither the word "dog", nor the word "health". Use minus sign (-), slash (/), or dot (.) instead.

[milkweed73]

Well that helps, glad we didnt spend time changing a bunch of page names with _'s just to find they are considered a charactor. Thank you.

I also read that google doesnt like seeing ID=##### in a URL. They dont like sessions as part of an address. Some of my page names are like breed.php?id=1. Is there a difference between id=# and ID=#? Can Google differenciate between the 2?

I know alot of this information is all over the net, but it all seems to be talked about in vague references. Like ID was not specified as being case sensitive, or if you have breedid=### will it pick up the id in breedid and think its a session ID? I hope my newbie questions can help other newbies that have got to be wondering about the same things. :)

Ray

[milkweed73]

I guess my questions are considered irrelevent. Thought this site would help with alot of feedback and educated responses, but 1 response in 3 days is kind of depressing.

Is it my deoderant?

[marek]

Id parameter is no longer a problem in Google. When it was about a
year ago, Google differentiated between 'id' and 'ID'.

Regarding session IDs in URL, you have to avoid them, because they
create virtually infinite amount of duplicate content, what's a deadly
trap for all robots.

[welshy]

:(

Glad i read this post.

I have loads of pages and folders with something_blah :(

Thats gona be a lot of work changing file names folders and links, oh and pic links will need to be changed :(

Also is there a way to stop session ID?

Welsh

[sirkei]

that uderscore is not a keyword separator, so e.g. "dog_health.php" contains neither the word "dog", nor the word "health".

This is not a good news to me as i thought that underscore is better than slashes. I used terms such as [mysite.com...] as main directory. So should i change them to Educational-Books/ instead? But i hope i will lose some pagerank or whatever SE's point of view.

[Marcia]

The hypen is more user-friendly than underscores, if only because underscores can easily be mistaken for a blank space. I don't think it's absolutely necessary to bother changing for what's already ranking, plenty of sites rank fine that use underscores. But if it's done there should definitely be a 301 redirect so there won't be more than one page indexed with the same content.