Re: FN-FORUM: Does Googlebot include?

date posted 30th January 2006 09:33

On Monday 30 January 2006 10:02, 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?

Googlebot sees the same thing as people fetching a webpage froma browser see -
so if it's in your HTML code output, it sees it, if it's not, it doesn't.

Googlebot can't see your actual PHP code, or read your database password, etc
(unless you choose to output it in html to the world, of course...)

What I tend to do, is put all included php files, libs, config stuff etc in a
separate directory, and then put a .htaccess file in that dir containing
this:

Deny From All

That way, it's impossible for someone to view your include files.

HTH

Matt