Newbie Question: Spidering PHP files

Another newbie? Don't groan too much.....I've been developing desktop and client/server database apps for lots of years. I've never done any web page stuff until I bought a couple sites written in PHP.

Question: How does googlebot read PHP files? My concern is these PHP created pages use dynamic titles......<title><? echo $site_title ?></title>.......in a single header file. Nice technique, but if there is no title, it seems to me these pages won't rank well. Same is true regarding dynamically created content.

Am I missing something here?

Hi northofthecitym,

First of all, welcome to the forum.

The spiders don't discriminate against PHP based sites as long as they comply with some basic guidelines (no spamming etc.).

Your question seems to be related to a template you're using. It's hard to comment on your problem based on the data you've given. But, you can always change the

<title><? echo $site_title ?></title> statement to something like:

<title><? echo $page_title ?></title> where you dynamically update the $page_title for each page.

I actually use a similar technique for my PHP based site.

I presume you also refer to the dynamic URLs when you say "Same is true regarding dynamically created content".

You can find a lot of material on presenting dynamic URLs in a spider friendly way as well. The most popular one is the .htaccess rewrite utility.

If you can be more specific with your questions, there may be more people to give you some hints.

Good luck with your site and PHP...

You have got to also keep in mind that the SE never actually "see" your PHP scripts. These are executed on the server side. All SE's see is the resulting code that is output from the script, which should be HTML. As indicated in an earlier post, the use of mod rewrites can also help.

Hopefully there's an include file to fix this in.

I use templates in my sites by including two files... one is the header file and contains the table for the whole page. The second contains the footer and the closing table arguments. So in my header I have a variable for the title but, assuming I don't pass a title value, I have a default title. So the code looks like


You're right that pages without a title will do worse than those with. Pick a good default title for your page, check for the variable and, if it's not set, make it the default. Makes templating, and your life, tons easier.