HTML or PHP

Hello everyone,

Just a curiosity of mine, what do you think is best for SEO? HTML or php pages?
In my oppinion is no difference, anyway I am curious to hear your oppinions.

Ovi

[stealthhosts]

they are both the same ovi.

In terms of what the search engines see there is no difference, PHP is simply the stuff that tells the server what to display in the page. You can use php to show pure javascript if you like, or xhtml it makes no difference.

You would have

PHP- do some stuff to get my content
end php
php - show content
html
head
end head
body
end body
end html
php - stop showing content

[Paul_KY]

PHP should be embedded in HTML. I don't think there's an SEO issue, but it's better code.

While this is not exactly a coding issue it's more of the way you link your pages.

for example doing this:

example.com/help.php

would be better than:

example.com/index.php?Page=Help

Again, not exactly related to the code it self since php just generates dynamic content.

Ovi, I run a website for over 6 years completely programmed in html, the rankings are very good. Haven't had that much rankings with a dynamic php pages yet.

[temi]

I think php is treated almost like html this days as long as its clean php for example "page2.php" and not "page2.php?=3334dfafdaf3534 "

Google states that they have troubles indexing url's with special characters which is the reason some php content pages don't rank high (if at all). If you can keep the code clean as temi pointed out then it isn't usually a problem, again, according to google.

[stealthhosts]

so that has nothing to do with php code per se duke.

That is referring to variable based urls (this can be done in javascript, html, php, asp, .net etc)

There are easy ways around this but it seems to be the easy solution.

My understanding is that what they are talking about is : index.php?myname=bob&myage=60&location=alabama

In that instance, google would only ever index the index.php file (most of the time). What people 'should' do is use something like mod_rewrite to re-write the urls before being passed to the client (and therefore the spider) to become : site/index/mynameisbob/myageis60/mylocationisalabama/

It's a convoluted example but you get my point.