I know the thread title isnt very clear, but simply, my question is this:

I run a credit card, loan and insurance site and currently I have pages setup like this:

Cards/badcredit.php
Cards/goodcredit.php
Cards/Bad/pre-paid.php
Cards/rewards.php
Cards/Rewards/travel.php
etc.

Essentially they are real physical files that are the same as every other credit card page, except for the MySQL query is changed to grab different types of cards.

Is it alright instead, if I simply create a Cards.php and use a system like:
Cards.php?Category=BadCredit and then mask it with Htaccess? Will it affect my SEO, is it good for SEO(Provided I have a sitemap that links to each of these pages)? It definitely seems like a cleaner way to do this and I would like to switch over to remove the clutter and crap of having many different files that I have to edit everytime I make a change to the site..

I don't think there's any difference at all between using a real directory structure or a rewrite structure using .htaccess.

As long as the pages have good content and are not created for search engines only, I don't think the search engines themselves really care.

/Andreas

html static pages have always done the best for me. Yes search engines are better at spidering dynamic pages, but html has still done slightly better.

Its also not difficult to turn dynamic pages such as php into static pages, or run php code on static pages. mod rewrites with htaccess will do it for you.