: When using GET to specify a page fragment to load, will it be seen as a URL by a search engine? It's quite common, although not always recommended, to see something in the form of http://my.site.com/index.php?page=welcome

@Fox8124981

Posted in: #Googlebot #GoogleSearch #SearchEngines #Seo

It's quite common, although not always recommended, to see something in the form of my.site.com/index.php?page=welcome or simply my.site.com?page=welcome. The script (index.php in this case) will then get a "page" item equal to "welcome".

If there are several of these in links within a page, will Google and other search engines index each as a separate page, or will it ignore the "query" part of the url? Consider this simplified example:

<?php // Our index.php - Simple multi-view page ?>
<a href="index.php?page=welcome">Welcome Page</a>
<a href="index.php?page=about">About Page</a>
<a href="index.php?page=contact">Contact Page</a>
<?php
if(!isset($_GET["page"])) $_GET["page"]="welcome";
switch( $_GET["page"] ) {
case "about": echo '<p>This is the About page</p>'; break
case "about": echo '<p>This is the Contact page</p>'; break
default: echo '<p>This is the Welcome page</p>'; break

}
?>


My question here is when Google crawls this page, will it see each of the three pages we link to as separate links, or will it only index a single page (index.php) and ignore everything after the ??

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