3 replies to this topic

[venkatesh]

Hi

Does anyone know if a site done in php hinders search engines. I am starting a new web site and the developer is using php. The site is far from finished but before I continue adding pages and making design changes I need more information on php. What are the drawbacks, should I have it coded in pure html?

Thanking You.

[Randy]

Used correctly, php has no adverse effect. It's all just html by the time the search engines see it.

The three things to watch out for are:

• Limit the number of variable-value pairs to three or fewer. I personally shoot for a maximum of 2 variable-value pairs for new sites, but have plenty of pages with 3 variables indexed.
• Don't force ever visitor to accept a cookie in order to view any page you want to be indexed. You can request to set a cookie, just don't require one to view a page.
• Make sure the URLs don't end up having a Session ID. Sessions should only be used when necessary, like when you have to track state because someone has added something to their shopping cart. They should never be a required element to normally view pages.

That's it, that's all. Cover those three and PHP is fine.

[torka]

This is a persistent myth.

Constantly changing, randomly circulating content and "freshness" don't have anything to do with SEO. They may lead to more frequent spidering (possibly), but how often they choose to recheck the content on the page is not one of the ranking factors used by the search engines.

In fact, such content changes can even negatively affect rankings if they cause the specific keyword focus of the page to constantly shift. When the search engines can't figure out what a page is "about," problems often ensue.

Likewise if you're constantly changing the title tag in response to random on-page content changes. Double if all these changes are being done automatically, without human review and approval before they get pushed out to the web. For some reason, the phrase "shooting yourself in the foot" springs to mind.

I've got pages on my site that haven't been changed in years and they still rank very well for their target terms. It's how well the page is optimized for the target search terms, not how allegedly "fresh" the content is, that makes for good rankings.

--Torka

[Traffic-Bug]

Its not a problem if the site has all php pages. Simply specify all the URLs in the sitemap and that is enough. Specify the link rel=canonical in your pages meta tags and that will take care of session id's and multiple parameters if you have them in the URLs.