parsing php in html - is it as good as html for search engines?

[nickyfraggle]

Hello!

Not sure if anyone can say for certain, but I've created a database driven site which uses php to interact with my mySQL database. I've heard that scripting languages are less search engine friendly, and have managed to FINALLY parse php in my html pages.

What I was wondering was whether parsing php in html pages is actually more search engine friendly than simply using .php files to begin with?

Basically, its a free business listing that I'm doing for experiece (I'm a university student working on getting the all important industry/practical experience!) and I'd like to make sure that people's details are found and indexed as easily as possible by search engines.

I mean...it does make sense that html pages are better, as the information is there straight away, rather than only appearing when the page is opened by a user (and it is pulled out of the database), but does parsing the php make it any better?

What do you all think? Any advice would be really appreciated!

Thanks,

Nicky

[pb&j]

afaik...
since the php is parsed before the page is displayed, it would have the exact same effect as a normal html based page.

[ghell]

I wasn't sure if nicky meant php generated .html files (like forum archives) or the html generated output from .php files (normal php files) but I'm also not sure if it makes any difference.

Search engines use spiders to download the generated html either way as long as there is a link to the page from another page which has been parsed by content. When a page is downloaded, the content and URLs are parsed out. The content is added to the search engnie's word database and the urls are used to grab more pages if possible. Hope that helps a bit :)

[VIPStephan]

Maybe it's about search engine friendly URLs?
Search engines are more likely to index sites with a "static" URL (http://website.com/page.html) than sites with dynamically produced URLs (http://website.com/page.php?section=12&page=4).

In this case a mod rewrite in the .htaccess file is the solution. It will rewrite those complicated URLs into "normal" ones and search engine ranking will increase.

Don't know a good source but this might give you a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_engine

[kiwibrit]

I saw no difference in SE ratings when I started parsing php as html.

[ronaldb66]

Nickyfraggle,

You are kindly requested to not crosspost the same question in multiple forums--which you have done twice already--as per the forum Rules (http://www.codingforums.com/rules.htm).

You are wasting people's time trying to anser a question that has been answered already (http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=92050).