Search Engine rankings

[ponyboy]

Does it affect search engine rankings when the page navigation on my site all uses one page and changes content based on an ID? For example, index.php?pid=1 is one page index.php?pid=2 is a different page, etc.

Any advice would be great! Thanks!

[Nexic]

The SEs will still index sites where the overall url changes, even if its a php?value=1 type of thing. The only time you'd have trouble is if those values were hidden.

Though in general it is better to use descriptive page file names, look into using Mod Rewrite on your dynamic urls.

[UnknownGuy]

I was actually reading about the google search engine, and they said that if a php page has the variable id in it(in the url) I don't believe it will read/add it.

Might want to watch for that. (Though I'm not 100%).

[joe]

My webpage uses a single page to generate the content dynamically (index.php?id=xxxx). My start page hase a page rank of 4 all my other pages has a page rank of 0.

The same on my sub-site www.intermediaware.de/absoluteblue. Startpage has a page rank of 3, all other pages has 0.

I don't know if this will also occur if I would have "better" filenames.

I also thought of using mod rewrite serveral times, but I have to rewrite some parts of my cms. Probably I'll try it if I'll find some time to do it :)

[Sharpfish]

Pagerank is for backlinks to those pags not SEO. You can see many sites with good search engine positions for keywords that still have a low pagerank (mine included). I would concentrate on boosting search results from humans primarily and then worry about pagerank (by getting link exchanges, backlinks and links links links in general!) :)

[Nexic]

My webpage uses a single page to generate the content dynamically (index.php?id=xxxx). My start page hase a page rank of 4 all my other pages has a page rank of 0.

The same on my sub-site www.intermediaware.de/absoluteblue. Startpage has a page rank of 3, all other pages has 0.

I don't know if this will also occur if I would have "better" filenames.

I also thought of using mod rewrite serveral times, but I have to rewrite some parts of my cms. Probably I'll try it if I'll find some time to do it :)


Actually I'm guessing all of those PR zero pages will soon have PR 1 or 2. I just checked all the google datacenters for one of them and one datacenter is showing PR 1 (the others showing 0). This indicates it will change to 1 in the next big PR update and so is being indexed.

If you don't think google is indexing your pages you should try: site:http://www.yoursite.com - that will list all the indexed pages (this command works with all major SE's)

I also notice you are using pictures to link, in most cases spiders have a harder time indexing links using images as opposed to using text. It might be worth putting a bunch of text links to each page at the bottom of each page similar to what I've done on my site. You could also try submitting a google sitemap.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I use static URLs for all subpages on my sites (www.newcrayon.com, www.philsteinmeyer.com). The main pages are PR 5 each. The subpages that have been around for 2+ months are generally PR 4. New pages (especially recent articles on my blog), are generally PR 0, but I guess google catches up after a couple months and gives them PR 4.

[kay.altos]

I was actually reading about the google search engine, and they said that if a php page has the variable id in it(in the url) I don't believe it will read/add it.

Might want to watch for that. (Though I'm not 100%).

Agreed! I've read it too.

[soniCron]

I disagree -- the results say differently (http://www.google.com/search?&q=inurl%3Aid%3D).

[Sillysoft]

Google will index and rank pages that have parameters in them. There's a limit to how long it can be though. i.e. urls with 5 parameters are less likely to be indexed then ones with none or 1. In general I would say you should get plain static URLs for your most important pages. When using folders or page names, use a good keyword in it.

[GameFoolsjs]

I think if you have high quality links to your site, the id variables become less important, but in general SEs give higher value to static urls. If you're running php, and you want to set up your url as static, drop the following code in your .htaccess file:

<Files filename>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</files>

That will force the file to be preprocessed as a php file even if it doesn't have the extension. Then you just change the way your variables are listed and parse them out of the url with php code.

For example,
instead of page.php?id=12
use:
page/12/index.html
and then parse the 12 out of the url and google will never know the difference between this and a static html page.