Can SearchEngines read SQL conent?

[chrismarx]

Content is really helpful for search engine placement, but only if the engines can read it.

My site uses PHP to retrieve its articles from a MySQL database.
Can search engine spiders still index my articles for keywords?

First post,
Thanks for the help!

[LifeinAsia]

If the article text is on your site, search engines can see it.

Search engines only see the rendered page- they don't know or care if page was created by hand, dynamically generated with PHP or some other scripting languages, used data stored in a database, processed content from an XML feed, or dynamically scraped from other site (well, some CAN know and DO care about the latter).

But the spiders can only see what you are displaying on your pages. They can't directly go into your database and spider all the content that's not displayed- that would be a huge security hole! Not to mention that it would be completely worthless to spider index that's not publically available.

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 7:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]

[ebound]

Use the View -> Source option in your browser and you'll see what the search spiders see.