Would using a central “page handler” affect SEO negatively?
eg A page request comes in for http://www.mysite.com/index.php, which mod_rewrite passes on as http://www.mysite.com/handler.php?page=index. Handler.php gathers the page-specific includes, language files and templates, and outputs the resultant html.
My understanding is that the page handler method won’t be any different SEO-wise than serving index.php directly, as the content and publicly visible url remain the same regardless of the monkey-business going on behind-the-scenes, but I’ve been wrong before… 🙂
Search engines can only see the end HTML result. They have no idea if you’re using a central page handler – how would they without hacking into your site’s FTP?
Also, as many frameworks and CMSes use this technique – Drupal and WordPress come to mind immediately – Google et. al. would be lunatics to penalise it, even if they could detect it.