Coding style and search engine spiders

I like to do the following as my style. For any page to be displayed, I
have three files.

File one: something.php
File two: somethingInclude.php
File three: something Process.php

File one essentially has little more than three lines withn the <?php ?>
block. They are:

require("somethingProcess.php");
$htmlInclude = "somethingInclude.php");
require("template.php");

template.php is all the unchanging html stuff that constitutes the look and
feel of the page. It also has in its middle a line <?php
require($htmlInclude); ?>, which pulls in the page specific html stuff in
the content area. (It may also pull in some other files because I don't
like any given file to get too big).

All the processing is done in somethingProcess.php.

My son tells me that by doing it this way it is inviting rejection by the
search engine spiders. I don't see why since all those spiders see is the
generated html code, which has all the meta-tags in it. Am I right or is
he?

If he is correct , I can always modify the template.php to only include the
body portion and keep everything else outside in the something.php file
(meta tags, scripts, etc.)

So, is he right or am I?

>all those spiders see is the generated html code

Correct. Technically, you could have a hundred include files in one
script, one for each word. All the search engine spider is going to
see is the gererated output of that script.

..oO(Shelly)

>I like to do the following as my style. For any page to be displayed, I
>have three files.
>[...]
>
>All the processing is done in somethingProcess.php.
>
>My son tells me that by doing it this way it is inviting rejection by the
>search engine spiders.

Nope.

>I don't see why since all those spiders see is the
>generated html code

Correct.

>which has all the meta-tags in it. Am I right or is
>he?

You're right. The search engine doesn't see anything different than a
normal browser, in fact it's just another kind of user agent. And no
user agent can tell just from looking at the received content how it was
created or generated.

Micha

Things get a bit more complicated of course when you start generating
the output of the script depending on a query string URL (such as
www.example.com?topic=maths&subtopic=pi ) as some search engine
spiders do not follow anything after a "?" char. This could stop you
dynamic page being generated/read by the spider.

However, in recent times, since LOTS of web pages are dynimically
generated in this way, spiders have got better at this kind of thing
and can follow some complex URL links. Still provides a problem
though...

Regards,

Paul

Thanks everyone. I'm glad to get the confirmation.

Shelly