PHP and Web bots

[mnewhart]

Could someone who knows about WEB Bots and how they cache your site in a search engine tell me if using index.php will be cached. My primary concern is that I would love to build a template based website using include(), but does a webbot read only the html and skip the php, or does it actuall compile/parse the php code to get the final html result like you would see in a browser?

[eoghain]

A bot works excatly like a browser. Since the only information that your web server sends off is the HTML the bot has to read that HTML.

Your Web Server will parse and run your PHP code to generate the HTML that gets sent to the bot, which will read the HTML and catalog it's information.