PHP echo and Search engine crawling

PHP
1

Hi guys, I’m new to the forums and have been trawling google for a while now trying to find an answer to the following question, hoping someone here can help me.

I have a site which I have been developing for a while…

To make it easier to update, the pages contain a series of while statements which run a function for each row in a database which satisfies a given SQL query. The function is in an external file and contains an echo statement which outputs html code with database entries injected amongst it, e.g to display a particular image with related text.

Do search engine spiders see the code as it is seen by the browser, ie including the database entries, or do they just see the call to the function/the function itself.

I ask this because the site is very poor in searching page content through search engines and I am wondering if this is due to the way it is structured or just because there is too much seemingly unrelated content on each page.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

2

SE spiders see the same thing you see when you look at the page. The fact that the content is generated by PHP doesn’t matter at all and no, they can’t see what functions you are calling, nor any other information about the PHP source for that matter.

For all intents and purposes, SE spiders don’t regard your PHP generated page any differently than they would had you just hardcoded the HTML :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for reply Scallio, At least I can rule out php as the problem. I will have to see what I can do to target the content a bit better.