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Do google "bots" read PHP??

by Ilya Feynberg
6 replies
I'm trying to get down to some recent slaps I've experienced with adwords and after reading what beating adwords has to say about non static html sites, I'm wondering if the slap came as a result of the code on my site and not the relevancy.

All my pages end in .php and my footer and navigation bars are all in .php. Could the problem be that google isn't reading my page properly because of this, and so my page is slapped as a result of the lack of relevant content or code errors etc..??

Thanks to all in advance!
#bots #google #php #read
  • Profile picture of the author Art Turner
    My understanding is that the php executes and the bot reads what the visitor would read.

    Art

    [EDIT] If you have concerns, put the site in your Google Webmaster Tools account and under statistics, click on "What Googlebot sees"
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  • Profile picture of the author vansterdam
    Google should not care that your site is written with php. php and other server side code gets processed on the server and outputs html to the browser or search engine spider. So the search engine would not see anything different than they would on a static html page.

    Perhaps there are other reasons for the slaps. With php it is quite easy to mass-generate a ton of pages with no unique content. Maybe Google doesn't like something like this.
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  • Profile picture of the author Spinethetic
    First off PHP is a server-side programming language. All server-side languages are parsed by the server into the webpage as common HTML.

    To reiterate, if you have a file menu.php and you are including it into your webpage with
    PHP Code:
    <?php include('menu.php'); ?>
    Google nor any other search engine nor your visitors will be able to see that code, they will instead see the HTML code within menu.php etc...etc...

    And no .PHP formatted pages are not slapped or 'looked down upon' by any search engines, you just have to be careful with how many variables you post into the URL.

    Best Regards
    ~Ross Vaughn
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    • Profile picture of the author mdunn123
      Originally Posted by BIG Mike View Post

      No, the bots will not see the PHP - it's impossible.

      When you enter a URL to any web page containingg PHP, first, the PHP code itself is executed on the server. Any resulting HTML output is then sent to the caller, whether it's a visitor's web browser or a spider/bot.

      That's the simple explanation - it's a little more complex than that, but you can rest assured anything accessing a web page properly configured to execute PHP will never see the code - only the resulting out put.
      Thanks Big Mike! I understand it a bit better now!

      Originally Posted by Spinethetic View Post

      First off PHP is a server-side programming language. All server-side languages are parsed by the server into the webpage as common HTML.

      To reiterate, if you have a file menu.php and you are including it into your webpage with
      PHP Code:
      <?php include('menu.php'); ?>
      Google nor any other search engine nor your visitors will be able to see that code, they will instead see the HTML code within menu.php etc...etc...

      And no .PHP formatted pages are not slapped or 'looked down upon' by any search engines, you just have to be careful with how many variables you post into the URL.

      Best Regards
      ~Ross Vaughn
      Thanks for your response Ross! What do you mean by being careful on how many variables I post into the code? How can that effect me and what type of variables are we talking about?
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  • Profile picture of the author Diana Lane
    WordPress sites are pretty much all php, and they've been doing notoriously well in the search engines for a while now, even the straight-from-the-box vanilla installations with no SEO plugins. Your problem isn't php.
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    • Profile picture of the author mdunn123
      Originally Posted by Diana Lane View Post

      WordPress sites are pretty much all php, and they've been doing notoriously well in the search engines for a while now, even the straight-from-the-box vanilla installations with no SEO plugins. Your problem isn't php.
      Diana,

      Thank you for your response! I'm coming to that conclusion as well, but I have to make sure that the way I'm using the php isn't the problem. Also my concern currently is with adwords and not just seo, I'm worried how it does or does not affect my quality score.
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