Do search engine spiders read includes?
- Thread starter RalphyBoy
- Start date
php includes are processed server side and essentially makes one page out of whatever you are including. So, when a users web browser or a search engine bot "sees" your page. they can't see the include code but rather the merged content. The include itself won't effect SEO in any way, but the content you are including will.
Monrox
Power Member
- Apr 9, 2010
- 617
- 588
The include code can be seen sometimes, something like bot="Include" with a pointer url to the include. Just look at the source code of the page and you'll see the whole include's html there, marked as such. What most bots don't do is executing actual local scripts on the website.
Monrox
Power Member
- Apr 9, 2010
- 617
- 588
Anything that relies on javascript, flash, silverlight and whatnot is generally called a 'script' (for brevity, it's not necessarily the best description). When a browser sees a script it starts it, just like you start an exe when you see one.
What happens then is up to the script, in case of youtube for example a player gets started, a video downloaded and played. In case of an adsense block the script connects to a G. server and downloads links to be shown to the visitor.
A spider downloads the page and usually never executes these scripts. No videos, no contacting of third party servers, no popups, nothing. That is why you don't see impressions when crawlers visit your page. If you disable scripting in your browser you'll get similar results.
Bots also don't run any PHP scripts (like includes) but they don't have to. Your host assembles the page and sends the result. There are still traces of this procedure though as indicated by the presence of the bot="Include" tag.
So to summarize, bots can by all means see when you are using includes and it's a matter of preferences whether to penalize their usage. So far this has never been the case and search engines don't not consider includes duplicate content (but they also don't put them in their index).
What happens then is up to the script, in case of youtube for example a player gets started, a video downloaded and played. In case of an adsense block the script connects to a G. server and downloads links to be shown to the visitor.
A spider downloads the page and usually never executes these scripts. No videos, no contacting of third party servers, no popups, nothing. That is why you don't see impressions when crawlers visit your page. If you disable scripting in your browser you'll get similar results.
Bots also don't run any PHP scripts (like includes) but they don't have to. Your host assembles the page and sends the result. There are still traces of this procedure though as indicated by the presence of the bot="Include" tag.
So to summarize, bots can by all means see when you are using includes and it's a matter of preferences whether to penalize their usage. So far this has never been the case and search engines don't not consider includes duplicate content (but they also don't put them in their index).