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Google submission - index.html or index.php ?

I have a site just gone live for a customer, been a labour of love for a long time (months) and finally its approved. So far, the site is not even indexed by Google so I need to submit it in the next day or so after tagging and keywording.

The site relies on some PHP scripting on each page - question is does Google prefer an index.html over an index.php for ranking or does it see it the same? Any experience with this when it comes to optimization?

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Permalink Reply by Jez Timms on July 24, 2008 at 7:54am

Hi Chris,

Nearly any programming language can now be crawled by Google.

Google can and does index the php files but they are not treated the same as html for some reason. What are the other pages in your site structure named? Are they search engine friendly such as:

/i-am-a-nice-page.php

And not: ?fjhksdf=1.php

That will help as well - this can be done by mod rewriting all your dynamic files to html.

If you want to speed up submission then create a Google sitemap. If you are using a CMS then there are lots of plugins out there that can create these automagically for you.

Or you can use this tool - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

Hope that helps :)

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Permalink Reply by Chris Marwood on July 24, 2008 at 8:04am

Yes, /the-main-pages-are-all-nice.php :) Not used the sitemap tool yet so will have to investigate that one further. Ta!