PHP & and SEO implications

Hey there folks!

We all know that in terms of SEO, it's a good idea to have HTML or W3C compliant code. This helps out with spiders hitting and liking your code.

Now...PHP uses the '&' to concatenate the string of a URL if there are more than one argument being passed.
Google has said that it will index something like 5 or 6 arguments, but it's thought that most spiders won't take more than 2 or 3 arguments in a URL.

I have two, and just ran my code through the validate to find that the '&' isn't really valid markup.

They suggest that I change my PHP.ini file.


Does anyone out there actually do this?

Do you think there is a significant effect to SEO with the use of non valid W3C code, by using the &?

Do you think it's worth changing?

Thanks for the feedback...

Kris

Hi Gnome101,

I code using php but have never gone to the .ini file to change the directive for the concatenate operator. To get good validation I use & during coding (mypage.php?arg1=$var1&arg2=$var2&...) - which is echo'd as & -and gets the green up without any effect on url performance.

I'm going to have to try this out.

Thanks for the heads up...


Kris

This isn't php-specific behaviour. It's called a GET request, and is common to all languages. In fact, it started out as a way to replace the form POST request that some early browsers and gateways did not support.