Can the search engines spider a ssi page?

[No5needinput]

New to ssi I have a directory with my program and publish files in it but I want the root index page to be the front published page.

I can do this by placing
<!--#include virtual="/program/publish/index.shtml" -->

in the root as index.shtml.

Can google and other search engines read the page created?

[richlowe]

SSI is executed at the server and appears to search engines and humans alike as just standard HTML. Except for the file type (.shtml) there is no way to even know it is SSI (and you can define .HTML as SSI is you want, and in that case no one would ever know).

Richard

[No5needinput]

Thanks for the answer.