The typical way to write your index page, if you are not really that knowledgeable in PHP, is just go about coding whatever there is for the index page. For instance, suppose that your index page has a login form and some introductory text. Your approach would be to just write the code for the index page and then, for every link on that page, create another page. This would mean that you now have an index.php page, a contact.php page, a mail.php page and more.

The “index.php?page=home” Way

Instead of having a home.php page, you see something like “index.php?page=home”. The same happens for every page of the website. What happens is that the index.php page includes the code of the other webpages, as asked. The variable page that you notice in the url is actually a typical $_GET type global variable that you can read in order to identify what is the page that the browser asks for.

the actual code of index page would be:

$page = isset($_REQUEST['page']) ? $_REQUEST['page'] : 'home';

switch($page)
{
case 'home': break;
case 'mail': break;
case 'contact': break;
default:
$page = 'home';
}

include("$page.php");


The index page just gets the $_REQUEST['page'] global variable ($_REQUEST is a union of $_GET and $_POST, retrieves whatever is available).If an attacker somehow manages to upload a new php page, say hello.php, this index page, without the switch structure, would execute it normally when instructed with index.php?page='hello'. However, if the switch is there, hello.php never gets executed. Instead, the default home.php gets executed. This is always a very good practice and you should really stick to it.

That's really cool!!!

But before I rush off to implement it, how does this affect SEO? Will all of the pages be spidered on your site like they are when doing it the 'old fashioned' way, or just the index page? And does this mean that all PR goes to the index page?

how does this affect SEO?

It doesn't!

Will all of the pages be spidered on your site like they are when doing it the 'old fashioned' way, or just the index page

Old fashioned way?

And does this mean that all PR goes to the index page?

No!


You seem to think that the OP has just developed this method rather than copying and pasting the code

This method has been around as long as PHP has (and longer)!

For small sites I prefure using header and footer files with variable in the top of the file to overwrite metadata, title etc and structure the folders and files.

For large sites you cant beat the dynamic way like this but as chris says, its as old php and then some. Although there are far more efficient and dynamic ways than using case/break.