.php Vs .html

Which is better to use when starting a new website?

[adamnichols45]

How do the search engines rate php sites compared to html sites.

I was wondering that by coding in php that im somehow limiting my website in terms of higher search engine placement.

Are my ideas true?

[joaquin112]

.php will be indexed and ranked well by the Search Engines. However, you should be extra careful of having variables within the URL such as .php?var=1&var2=2.

In my experience, .html DOES rank better than .php, but I am and could never be sure. I would certainly recommend to parse .html as .php from your server, it's very easy to do.

[SEOdevhead]

I have many websites, some with .htm and some with .php. I honestly believe that it makes no difference whatsoever because my php sites are doing better in SERPs than my htm pages. And I have one .php site that is absolutely killing in all the engines. So don't even think twice about it. Definitely go .php so you can have greater control later on if need be.

[rj87uk]

Just use PHP there is no difference in ranking unless you start using variables in your URLs all over the place. Starting with PHP is a good thing because you can start adding more functionality later on.

[SEOdevhead]

Yep... definitely use .php. I don't even think the parameters are that big of a deal now for search engines. They now get the end result, and the only thing you have to worry about is dupe content, which btw... the SE's have gotten might good at (in the sense they know what is true blackhat dupes).

[FourDegreez]

It's considered good practice to hide the underlying implementation; therefore use .html and not .php. Besides, the output is an HTML document, is it not? If you were outputting a plaintext file, you'd probably want the extension to be .txt and not .php, right?

[caveman]

The SE's don't care one wit about this stuff. Choices on .html versus .php should be made on the basis of site management needs. As long as the implementation is easily spiderable and there are no implementation snafu's, it makes no difference from an SEO perspective. Use what makes most sense for your needs.

IMHO, php is nice only because it offers great flexibility in terms of site management. But small uncomplicated sites can still be managed very nicely in straight html thank you.

[g1smd]

Search engines cannot SEE the PHP code on the page.

They only see the HTML that is output from the script.

The biggest mistakes that PHP programmers make is:
- not having unique title and description per page
- having tag soup HTML that does not validate
- having multiple URLs that can access the same content.

Avoid those three pitfalls and your PHP page will do as well as any static HTML coded site can do.