Re: FN-FORUM: Does Googlebot include?

date posted 30th January 2006 09:37

Derek Jempson wrote:
>
> Welcome to Monday everyone!
>
> I've received conflicting advice about this so here goes. Can the
> Googlebot, or any search engine spider for that matter read and
> follow PHP or any other type of includes?
>
> What I'm getting at is this. If I "include" a page header that
> contains the Meta tags, will the spiders "see" it and treat is as
> part of the page?

Spiders read the HTML that is served by your web server. It doesn't
matter to them how the HTML is generated.

When PHP includes an external file then the HTML that is produced
doesn't show how it was created, the included tags just appear in the
HTML in the right place in the document.

To demonstrate that to yourself just view the source of your page as it
is displayed in your browser. That's the view that the spiders get.

Dave...

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