Some days ago I was reading a discussion about indexing by Google and I was surprised by how much wrong information are shared through Internet.
We all know how easy to become Bloggers and write articles based on false myths. I have read very often articles about SEO and I have understand that many IT Bloggers don’t know anything about optimization of web pages, and they write on the basis of myths exclusively to increase the number of readers.
Returning to the main topic of this article:
After so many studies and experience regarding the use of web technology, server-side programming in PHP, Apache Web server administration on Linux platform, I cannot say that this is true, in fact I say the opposite.
A PHP script well coded returns output in HTML format, XML or XHTML. Google bots working exactly as a classic web browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera), but using a visualization in text-mode, without any graphic element (see Lynx for Linux).
In the past was possible to say that Google favouring the static HTML pages to the pages generated by server-side scripts, because the urls of static web pages contained one or more words that explain already the contents of a page. Naturally an url “http://www.my-seo-page.com/i-love-google.html” results more effective than an url generated by a PHP page “http://www.my-seo-page.com/index.php?id=10″ . In the first link in fact we can know that the web page talks about a positive opinion about Google, and Google could use this url as keywords. Instead, in the second url this is not possible.
With the actual technologies and with “mod_rewrite” introduced by Apache, it was possible to obtain the same url of a static HTML page, in a page generated by PHP, removing the differences between a static HTML web page and a page dynamically generated by server-side programming languages.
Often, “Webmaster Tools” offered by Google help us to know if there is a problem with indexing of our website. Also, it is possible to observe that an HTML version of website results more appreciated than a dynamic version.
This is possible because to generate a PHP page the server uses more resources (CPU and RAM), so our website will be slow for Google. Google give importance to the speed of a web server and often the use of an economic web hosting penalize the positioning of our website in Google Index.
Using a good hosting service will solve every problem about speed. If our hosting service not is good we cannot says that Google Loves HTML, but we must says that Google hate to wait many hours to index our website because in less time Google could index many other websites.
