Search Engine Optimization

[tda_digital]

For many of you this is going to sound like a very foolish question, but never the less I would like to hear from some outside sources opinions other than those I’m receiving.

In general can the “search engines” of the major four portal of Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN follow a link that has a .php extension? And, if it can does anyone knows, does it follow the .php extension the same way it would follow a .htm/.html link?

I’m asking the question in a general sense and would appreciate a reply in a general sense, since my question is based on a general link within a web site?

Thank you in advance, for your time and consideration in reviewing my request.

Regards,
Tom

[Jona]

I'd imagine they'd be all treated exactly the same, since the encoding is the same; a PHP file is the same as an HTML file, only the .php extension tells the server to parse the file with a specific application before sending it to the requesting client.

[sciguyryan]

Originally posted by Jona
I'd imagine they'd be all treated exactly the same, since the encoding is the same; a PHP file is the same as an HTML file, only the .php extension tells the server to parse the file with a specific application before sending it to the requesting client.



Yes, as Jona said they will be treated exactly the same.



RyanJ

[tda_digital]

Folks,

Both of you have been a very big help, more than you know. A lot of time was saved by your answers.

Regards,
Tom

[MstrBob]

I believe the confusion here arrises with dynamic pages. When you start using query strings, like: page.php?foo=bar and the like, well it gets a bit odd. I don't know much about this. I remember hearing once that some search engines cut it off, or that some simply don't follow those links. But at any rate, I don't know definately about that. But .php, .asp, .aspx, .htm, .html, .jsp Those should all be followed, unless the search engine is told otherwise.

[Jona]

Search engines only find pages that are linked to; if page.php?foo=bar is linked to somewhere on the Web, the search engine should find it. This is done by search engine indexing, also known as web-crawling or spidering. Hence, pagerank isn't necessarilly affected, though cruft-free URLs are often more SEO friendly because of their specificness (keywords in the URL).

[yuna]

Some engines ignore any GET information in links when spidering pages. The reason they give is that such information often contains temporary items like a session identifier that won't work when the page is later retrieved from the search engine's cache. At http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html, they write, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small."

[gizmo]

Further information can be found on the specialist forum at http://www.highrankings.com/forum. Incidently one of my sites uses query strings to pull another page and it is crawled (and validated) ok.

[jasin]

In general can the “search engines” of the major four portal of Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN follow a link that has a .php extension? And, if it can does anyone knows, does it follow the .php extension the same way it would follow a .htm/.html link?

Google can literally crawl any website having pages with following extensions :-

.html
.htm
.php (PHP),.asp(Active Server Page),.jsp,.aspx(.NET)
pdf,.doc and several others :o

[bokeh]

Google can literally crawlTry to concentrate on current threads instead of ones that are several years old.