Comments on: How to Get Your PHP Pages Indexed on Google

By: michael

michael — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:48:04 +0000

Great post; very informative.

By: fish

fish — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:37:24 +0000

I dont understand what does web 2.0 mean ?

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:39:54 +0000

@Dave

Regarding the Google statement, my guess is that “some rich media files” refers to Flash content, and “dynamic pages” refers to Javascript (I say that because so many people use AJAX these days to get pieces of content on their pages). Neither Flash content nor Javascript generated content is indexed by Google.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:34:24 +0000

Seems like Google ought to clarify the following, on their site as of 10/13/08:
“Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”
(from “Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the web”)
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897#1

By: Dave Bascom

Dave Bascom — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:30:12 +0000

@Jan – it’s true that Google is getting a lot better at indexing dynamic URLs like on your site, but I think Peter’s point is that you can improve beyond just getting the pages indexed. The structure, format, URLs, etc of the site certainly DO play a role in how well a site is indexed. Clean URLs are more user-friendly, more likely to get linked, and tend to perform better in the SERPs.

By: Jan

Jan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:45:46 +0000

I am not sure if my website contains more than 20 static URLs (no ?this=that), but I am sure that my website contains more than 4000 URLs with ?something=blablabla. And there is no problem with traffic, there is no problem with rankings in Google and there is no problem at all.

It all depends on what your website offers to it’s visitors, not how it’s made. There is really no need to avoid variables and values within URLs.

By: Peter Ehat

Peter Ehat — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:26:52 +0000

@Layne

Having your form’s action calling the page it’s on is just fine. I would however have your processing script redirect the results to a new page (look here for more info http://www.php.net/header). You can use session variables to propagate info that you need to display on the final page.

The reason I prefer a redirection is because you’ll be able to have a separate page that can be indexed (fixing the issue you’re asking about) as well as doing away with duplicate submissions. Your current setup will resubmit the form POST data again if someone hits refresh after submitting the first time (I just don’t like having to write code to guard against unintentional duplicate submissions).

By: Shiva

Shiva — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 05:57:40 +0000

Hi Layne,

I do not think that search engines crawler are that recursive to figure out whether a page can submit and then do that process and get content from a site. It does look for query strings and any url’s specified in the image src or links and then rel=nofollow and that’s all.

I do have a suggestion though, once you create a sitemap.xml – specify that page and mention the frequency level of change to be hourly, that way the robot can understand that it is a page that frequenty changes.

Hth,
Shiva

By: Layne

Layne — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:03:32 +0000

I’m having a problem that led me to your article. Most of the pages on my site contain dynamic content (PHP) with .htm extensions. Google has no problem indexing them. However, I have two pages that use PHP for form processing, such that the form calls itself when submitted to check for errors before passing it to the form handler. No query strings are used, only the $_POST variable. Google seems to have a problem indexing these pages. Perhaps it’s because the page is dynamic, such that the page has the exact same url before and after the form is submitted, but the content is different. Could Google be following the “Submit”, and therefore be getting multiple version of the same page. Maybe if I restrict Google from following the “Submit”, the page will always look the same to Google and it won’t have a problem. Any insight?

By: Peter Ehat

Peter Ehat — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:19:16 +0000

Yeah, dynamic URLs should be re-written. I agree that doing so is best practice. Sites that have a bunch of crazy stuff in the URL are just not very cute. It is, however, not a requisite to getting your page indexed.