Thread: HTML vs PHP pages?

Hello
I am just finishing an SEO job for one of our main clients.
I instructed our designer to use basic html for all the important pages I have optimised for, the core and long tail phrases.
He has just shown me the finished site, all the pages are php even the ones I specifically asked to be HTML.
Q: does Google and the like index and rank php pages the same as HTML or will I have to get the designer to redo the main pages as basic HTML?
Everyone's thoughts, opinions, and experiences are much appreciated.
Best regards
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Code:

 RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [L]

use this in your .htaccess file . So you have a file called glasses.php, it will be accessible under glasses.html. Just change all the links from .php to .html.

There is no real benefit, google is capable of indexing many types of pages.

PHP is the programing language and HTML is the markup language.Html code is created by various way, including in php.

Originally Posted by niky

Q: does Google and the like index and rank php pages the same as HTML

Maybe the question should be do search engines prefer the extension .php or .html

As aathuls said above, php will process the output markup as html, an as Paul said use the rewrite rule to express it as .html
An example is this forum page, it’s .php but as you can see in the address bar it shows .html

In my experience the search engines will read .php and .html equally; however, the idea of the rewrite rule is to get a couple of keywords into the page URL, which may help your SERPS

You can always compromise and tell apache to treat files with a .html extension as php

In any case as Archstanton says, the more semantic URLs can help with SERPS

For search engines, the programming language is not important, it's the content and the way in which it's presented which gets you the results.

I still find html pages indexed better than php, my personal preference is php, you can make a php.ini file in your public_html folder or root, I'm sure if you do a search you can get the content.

yet a sitemap.xml file helps google, msn etc to index your php content pretty well

Originally Posted by savvi

I still find html pages indexed better than php, my personal preference is php

For what it's worth, I've found PHP/ASP/ASPx files index better, higher and get indexed more frequently. Remember, for almost everybody, SEO is about cause-and-effect. Many people may have had PHP files, read that HTML works better and so switch to HTML (why?) and then have seen a positive effect in SERPs. But there could have been a lot of other factors involved and any of these (Google calls them signals) may have been the "catalyst" of change in the SERP.

Some of the reasons many people feel (claim to feel) that HTML is better is because the name appears static and more controllable. If you have a single web page, e.g. mydomain/content.php and this PHP file controls all of your content without the URL changing, this would definitely be unhelpful for SEO. A basic easy rule of thumb -give each page a uniqe URL.

For example, your About Us page - this could be mydomain.com/aboutus.php or mydomain.com/content.php?about_us. Either way the file arrives as HTML to both your browser/GoogleBot

PHP is used to make HTML more dynamic than the usual use of Javascript. Its a server side process while HTML is client side.

I agree.. haven't heard so much about search engines giving higher value if it's in php or html format..