Search Engines and PHP in Page Title

janey

I have a mysql database of dogs that are up for adoption. When a user searches for a dog, I dynamically change the page title using PHP based on the type of dog they searched for.

For intstance, if they searched for Greyhounds, the resulting page title is "Greyhounds for Adoption", with Greyhound being an echo statement calling out the breed name.

So, my question is...what does the search engine see then for my page title? Now that I've created the page, I'm wondering if I've hurt myself as far as getting listed (though I do have meta tags).

Any comments/suggestions?

Thanks!!

maxpup979

It really depends on the search engine, as well as your application. Different search engines use vastly different techniques for searching, indexing etc....And really, the results page is probably not something that you want the search engine to index, since it may not be feeding the search fields properly.

Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ for some fairly useful info on what the search engines actually use. As for the other issue...what will they see....it could easily vary depending on your application is actually built. Since you hand in a search term, I assume thtat if you have an actual link to your results page, it would index whatever you display if there are no search terms passed in.

Hope that helps...😉

dalecosp

Some folks have gone so far as to create a static HTML page based on the expected content of the database driven pages. For example, "greyhounds.html" says:

We have some wonderful greyhounds for adoption....
<a href="list.php?breed=ghound">click here</a> to see them!!

Could be a lot of work, though....

Searchenginewatch is a pretty good site, but you'll have to ante up to get the "full" version, IIRC.....

HTH,

superwormy

PHP is SERVER SIDE, i.e. IT ONLY GENERATES TEXT / IMAGES, and NO-ONE besides Apache ever really sees any of your PHP code.

Thus, the Search Engine will see EXACTLY what your browser sees, and EXACTLY what you see when you choose ' View => Source '

People need to remember that PHP is Server-side only, your actual PHP code never gets sent to a browser / search engine / wget / Curl, it gets parsed before this and whatever HTML / XML / Image you told it to output is what gets seen.

This is why you can't do things like get teh screen resolution of the user, or upload a file without submitted a page, etc.

Remember that PHP is Server-Side, Javascript / Flash are Client-Side.