When using GET to specify a page fragment to load, will it be seen as a URL by a search engine?

Question

It's quite common, although not always recommended, to see something in the form of http://my.site.com/index.php?page=welcome"or simply http://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 ??

Answer 1

Querystrings are counted as part of a URL and variations will be considered unique URLs. So Google will see them as different pages. This also means, in your case, that you will have duplicate content issues and will need to use canonical URLs to specify which URL Google should consider the primary URL which is what will be shown in their search results.