[RESOLVED] Will using a lot of SQL harm my search engine ranking

Maharg105

,Hopefully this is quite a simple question, but there seems to be a lot of conflicting information on the net.

I have a website with a large amount of regularly changing information. So it is necessary for me to store most of my content in my database and dynamically generate my pages from it.

How do the search engine spiders work, will they simply view the source code of index.php and come to the conclusion that there aren't any keywords at all. Or will the spider also look at the content being generated by the SQL requests?

Thank again for all your help

johanafm

They have no more access to your source than anyone else who doesn't hack your server. They are no more capable of demanding information about anything than anyone else on the net. So, they pretty much see what your users see. Except for clientside funk.

Maharg105

Thanks for replying so quickly johanafm. Apologies, I might have mis phrased my question.

If I visit a website I am able to click 'view -> source' and have a look at the raw code for the page I am viewing. I wondered if the spider would be looking at this information and disseminating what it wanted from there.

Or if it would actually have look at the information that the SQL request was pointing to?

Thanks again

NogDog

The search engine spiders do not see the PHP source code: they see the [X]HTML source code generated by your PHP script, just like the browser does. They do not directly view the files on your site, but rather they send/receive HTTP requests just like your browser does. (If you do a "View Source" of this page, you will not see any of the underlying PHP code - including the SQL - just the XHTML source code; and that is the exact same thing that the search engines see.)

Maharg105

So, in essence. If I have news articles being brought up via php.includes and sql requests... non of this will be indexed by google and what not?

laserlight

Well... consider: this very forum thread is dynamic, isn't it? I have just made a post, and the content of this page has changed. The content is stored in a database, accessed in the PHP script that is vBulletin, through SQL.

Now, search the Web for "Will using a lot of SQL harm my search engine ranking". Has Google indexed this thread?

EDIT:
That said, this may be an unfair example in that the forum is very popular... but the point is that search engine robots are able to read and index such dynamic content, because ultimately it is accessible to them.

Maharg105

Thanks for the reply laserlight, that was what I was hoping to hear 🙂 Lateral thinking isn't always my forte!