URL PathVars ans Search Engines

[blindpete]

I've just taken on a client who is wanting me to build a website to be supported by advertising. The web site content is 1000's of pages... and as the content expands 10s of thousands of pages. Now all of this content is served up via a database and a few templates. Development wise its not a huge gig :-(

All the navigation is via hyperlinks and each page is served up with context and keywords provided by the database. I am wondering if the client uses adsence (or other context sensative ad service) if I make use of URL pathVars on Apache and PHP. So www.domain.com?topic=squirrels?item=grey it would become www.domain.com/squirrels/grey

Do the search engines treat it differently? I'm trying to understand if the search engines will index just root page or all 1000s of them?

Thoughts, suggestions and even fears welcome!

 

[Mark]

SE's will index either URL format, but the latter (domain.com/squirrels/grey) will possibly be crawled faster by engines which treat URLs containing variables as lower priority (does Google still do that?).

Good luck

 

[blindpete]

Thanks, so my customers three pages of PHP will look like thousands of pages and even generate a sitemap. I was concerned it would look like one of those endless link sites to a search engine. Thanks.