Remain calm, everyone. PHP is not your enemy. Some people might tell you that certain dynamic website technologies make your website “bad for SEO“. But, languages like PHP can actually make your website more efficient and easier to manage – which is good for SEO.
It is the way you build your website overall, strategically, and with visible content, that makes your website search-engine-friendly. Quality content is the foundation of your SEO worthiness. PHP is just one of many technologies used to build websites in a dynamic way – to pull and display content from a database-driven application, for example.
Sometimes, the URL (or “path”) of a page will look a bit lengthy and unattractive. Such as: www.webii.net/blog/12345?=123.php
This is not quite as SEO-friendly as we would like. But there are simple ways to improve the URLs of your website, by using either a built-in custom URL option inside of your software (like WordPress or Joomla) or by adding an SEO-friendly URL module to your software (such as with Drupal and Path Auto), or by using mod_rewrite features of the web server and modifying .htaccess files.
Sometimes this URL issue alone is what causes people to panic and say “PHP is not SEO-friendly”. This is simply untrue. In fact, many other languages like ASP any other database applications can have numerical or formula-looking URL structures, and they too can be modified with some work. There are some challenges if the web hosting server does not support the ability to modify the URLs (if the server does not support mod_rewrite), so in some cases, you need to work with your web host to accommodate this.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing!
Considering WordPress is one of the mostly widely used CM systems on the Internet and it is written in php, I am surprised people would believe that php is bad for SEO. WordPress (via php) makes changing your permalinks so easy it is a nada task. I just they would turn on permalinks using postname by default!
By the way, Matt Cutts says Google loves WordPress because it knows how to index it well…another big plus in favor of WordPress and php when it comes to SEO.
Thanks for chiming in, Matt. Right you are. Unfortunately, I still often get this question when speaking with small business owners working toward a new website design. Somewhere, somehow, a mean little birdy told them not to use PHP. Luckily information about this topic is becoming more accessible to them, so some people are starting to catch on.
apparently it would take weeks to update our site, and get it SEO’d
all i’d really want is the descriptions to appear correctly when people search in google, but then still have the news XML mapped to google news, so the content is fresh, it feels like a total nightmare, i can’t figure if this is affecting our ranking or not.