Does file extension matter from SEO point of view?

04.26.2010 · Posted in All, questions

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Student 1: hi sir,
Aji: hi
Student 1: Sir is html webpages are more SEO friendly then other webpages?
Aji: no
all pages are html pages
except the JS, XML, PDF and Flash ones (different format of pages you see)

Student 1: like php pages ?
Aji: even the php pages render html at the end interface,
php works at the server level extension doesn’t matter

Student 1: how does it work?
Aji: Let me write a post for it. The request goes to the server that the browser has requested for a page.

http://www.jeetbo.com/questions/why-pr-when-page-is-not-crawled.html

GET /questions/why-pr-when-page-is-not-crawled.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.jeetbo.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: (Details of cookies)

The server sends the following header along with the content.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:39:30 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.13
X-Pingback: http://www.jeetbo.com/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:39:30 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 8953
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

(Source: onlamp.com)
How PHP works?

Now look at the final output in terms of HTML, all the php work is done at the server level, it hardly matters for the browser side. Also a php extension file may just be a static page and .html file may be a dynamic page. At the PHP level you can mention the file extensions that will parse through PHP, even you can specify the .html to it and it will work exactly as a .php. Even you can have .gif file act like a php file by adding the file extension to go through the php processor.

Also this is a myth that .html means static and .php means dynamic. In the initial era it may have been like that but now it is not more a symbol of static or dynamic, it just means 2 extensions, thats it.

Also you may like to read #11 of http://searchengineland.com/36-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-40076