Sorry - maybe it's a stupid question - it's Friday late afternoon and the brain's not working properly - BUT - does Google recognize .php pages and the content in them. I have added a forum to my site and am wondering if the content on them will be of any benefit to me in terms of content and page ranking etc.

If it IS a stupid question - be kind! :-)

Thanks!

Yes..

Originally Posted by anchorjack

Sorry - maybe it's a stupid question - it's Friday late afternoon and the brain's not working properly - BUT - does Google recognize .php pages and the content in them. I have added a forum to my site and am wondering if the content on them will be of any benefit to me in terms of content and page ranking etc.

If it IS a stupid question - be kind! :-)

Thanks!

Short Answer:
Yes they treat them just like .html, they only care about the (x)HTML inside.

Long Answer:
Google (or any party connecting and/or viewing your .php page) can not see the PHP code inside of any .php page (Assuming your server is set up correctly). They can and do take the HTML that is produced from the PHP and crawl/index that.

That's very helpful - thanks so much!

Yes pages written in php, asp or other server side code get executed on the server and html code is output to the browser...or to the search engine spider. So search engines have no problem with such pages. They get treated just like actual html pages. If you are worried at all, you can just do a modrewrite to make the search engines think they actually are html files.

Off course they do

lol there would be a lot of major panic if google suddenly decided not to thats for sure lol !

Woc

Thanks everyone - that does set my mind at rest and - but the problem gets more complicated. Maybe you can help. The php pages of my new forum are set in an IFrame set in a div layer of a .php page. Everything works well - but my questions is whether any of those pages now showing up in the iframe would be of any use to me as far as google or the search engines are concerned?

Maybe I have to go back to square one?

Thanks!

Ah, now the real question comes out.. iFrames are not ideal for search engines..

If you really feel the need to use frames for some silly reason, and there aren't very many good ones, you should include a noframes tag with the content in the iFrame to help the search engines out..

Thanks for your input.

You're absolutely right about the iFrame of course, so I've decided not to go that route and have to try another way to try and figure out how toe customize the generated forum pages.

Thanks for your input.

Google definitley reads php pages as I have most of mine indexed!

i have a poartal site in .php form and its well crawled too

so no need to worry about the crawling or indexing of it, just get good backlinks from related sites

Yes, Google reads pages in php format.

I have been having this argument with my good friend for sometime. Funny, I never thought to post the question on the board or get a poll going or anything. I need to wake up!

There would be a pretty big problem if they didn't, many index pages are PHP based lately due to all of the content platforms out there. They treat it just like they would HTML and scan the content, save images, etc.

As far as I know Google can read any page like humans.

Yes, google read the .php pages like html too..

James.henry is right.

I use Iframes and the content will be picked up as a whole page.