[soilman]

Search engine "bot" find and categorize pages by going to one page and following links. Some links may be hard for bots to follow, like javascript links, or links from pages that you have to be a "registered user" to view. Or maybe links that you are brought to via a php or Perl script rather than a simple a href="page.html" link

My question is what about ordinary links that are in a server-side Include page. Not the main page, but a sub page, which doesn't necessarily even have an html extension, that an "include" command includes within the main page. Do the bots have any difficulty following those?

If I put all my links in a an "included file" -- a menu file in this case -- will the search engines find the links, go to them, and catalogue the pages the same as if the links were right on the main page?

 

[soilman]

OK it seems i've found the answer. the person who wrote the javascript menu controller with menus consisting of html links in unordered lists, says the html links in the menus are visible to search engines.

 

[Indian Summer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by soilman

If I put all my links in a an "included file" -- a menu file in this case -- will the search engines find the links, go to them, and catalogue the pages the same as if the links were right on the main page?

I think bots will see basically what you see when you right-click "View page source" on a page. I'm assuming the contents of included files will be visible here.

You might also want to check out this site: http://www.robotstxt.org/