[RESOLVED] PHP and pagerank?

[wwwfilmfilercom]

I have a question about how php works with pagerank.

I understand that most search engines (or more importantly google) place importance on the title page containing keywords. When you have static webpages the title page will already be defined and the search engine spider will come and index it. How does this work for websites with dynamically assigned titles (using php for instance)

My website only has about 5 pages. And the main page through which searches are made has its title assigned dynamically. So will a search engine spider just see this as one page called 'search page' or will it somehow be able to index the results shown on it?

As an example think of ebay, kelkoo etc. When I search for a product on a search engine I often find a link like 'cameras sony found at ebay' etc etc.

Will my site be treated the same?

[penagate]

Assuming that the searches follow a consistent URL structure, and do not expire (unlike this site), they will be indexable by search engines.

Some people place stock in having dynamically rewritten URLs rather than a query string. For example:
http://example.com/products/chairs/
rather than:
http://example.com/products.php?cat=chairs

You can read more about that here: Semantic URLs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic URLs)

I prefer to do this simply because it looks nicer, but I don't believe it really helps search engine rank to any significant degree. You'll notice that VBForums pages tend to rank highly on Google and we don't use that type of URL structure.

My personal philosophy is that you shouldn't ever have to worry about search engine rank. Structure your pages using meaningful markup and arrange them in some sort of logical fashion and the page ranking will come with it.

[wwwfilmfilercom]

Hmm thanks for that although I think we are talking about 2 different things..

I understand what you mean about semantic URLs and they are pretty but obviously I don't think they matter much to search engines..

What I mean is that I only really have 1 main page (index.php) through which all of my searches occur. Now if I had 100 different pages the search engines would pick this up and index each one seperately. If I only have 1 however how can they pick up my site for searches which are in my database but dont necesarily have a static page for... unless searched... do you understand? lol I hope so...

[penagate]

I do understand and I thought that I had answered that. The answer is yes, they will be indexed, as long as there are some links to them. A search engine cannot find a page which is not linked to from anywhere.

[wwwfilmfilercom]

Ah ok, I don't have to worry... out of interest - how? Or is this something I don't really need to be concerned about?

[penagate]

Why how? It's no different to indexing a static page. The crawler finds a URL; the crawler indexes the URL. It neither knows nor cares how the page is generated.

[wwwfilmfilercom]

Well ok I think I'm just nit-picking; as long as it works thats ok with me! Cheers.