Do page extensions effect Search Engines?

[Clarkie]

Hey,

Recently I was posting in a couple of forums and noticed that some of them had extensions such as showthread.php?tid=1 and others had showthread-name-of-thread.

I was wondering if you think extensions have any effect on google and other search engines. One page of my site is misc.php?page=rsa. The misc.php page is blank, do you think this would have any effect on how google reads the page?

If so what extensions are better for google. Should you have a page ending in .php, a page without an extension or a page with something after the extension?

Sorry if this thread's a bit short and confusing but I'm in a bit of a hurry.

Thanks,
Clarkie

[Sn00p]

I dont think it matters. Php works on the server side and for the end user will read as html. I may be wrong but for whats its worth there are probably a lot better things to be worrying about in terms of seo than your file extensions. I am a bit of a noob though so dont just take my word on this!!!

[Clarkie]

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your opinion regardless of the amount of experience you choose to credit/not credit yourself with. The main thing I'm wondering is do search engines see pages like index.php?tid=1 and index.php?tid=2 as different pages or does it look at index.php. I say this because I noticed in a google search the other day that one forum thread was on google but the link was to showthread.php which didn't show any thread because the thread I'd was missing. Normally this isn't the case.

[grynge]

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your opinion regardless of the amount of experience you choose to credit/not credit yourself with. The main thing I'm wondering is do search engines see pages like index.php?tid=1 and index.php?tid=2 as different pages or does it look at index.php. I say this because I noticed in a google search the other day that one forum thread was on google but the link was to showthread.php which didn't show any thread because the thread I'd was missing. Normally this isn't the case.

Whilst I can't say I have seen any difference between pages/folders with extensions .htm .html .php or /folder/ I have seen large discrepencies with non sef urls. Some people are of the opinion google is smart enough to know the difference, but in my experience getting all pages indexed on large sites really depends on have sef urls, so no session id's or catid's or tid's.

Though google does tend to do better with big name scripts such as vb/wordpress but if it's a custom coded site then you will get problems with indexing.

[akirk]

I recently moved a 40,000+ page site over from variable based pages to SEF urls - mainly because I preferred them - Google was equally happy indexing both...
just look at Amazon / Ebay URLS - google is quite clever

Alasdair

[wussa]

Generally a website with a Search Engine friendly keywords is always much better than normal php extensions

example:

forumdisplay.php?f=32

Having that particular keyword in your domain helps you to get ranked better in search engines but in the end if your website is reputable enough and scores high for other factors like backlinks, unique content etc, then it matters less. Take DP forum as an example. According to what the owner said, most of the traffic he received was from Google yer his site does not have a particularly special SEO structure. Site reputation counts as the main factor here.

[leadegroot]

As a straight question of 'does x.php?a=1 index as well as 'x1.html' - the answer is, yes, they do fine.
But technicalities can be an issue - if some of the parameters are dynamic, you can have canonical issues, and generated pages can have everafter problems, eg a calendar that lets you click on 'next day' may take a bot off on an infinite crawl into the future. Not good.

[JJMcClure]

Yeah like Leadgroot says, PHP parameters can make a difference if they can create a situation where the same content can be generated in differnt ways, like a page that can be sorted by category, price, weight, postage charges etc. The bot can get stuck in an inifinite loop generating the same content over and over and eventually will decide that it's duplicate content and just stop crawling. This can cause pages to not be listed. Session IDs are a bad idea too, Google definitely doesn't like those.

If that can't happen then I don't think that a few PHP parameters make any difference to SEO at all, lots of the biggest sites have them like Amazon and Ebay as akirk points out, definitely isn't hurting their rankings. On the other hand, SEF URLs (which is a misnomer IMO) are more human friendly and it never hurts to have your keyword phrase in the URL.