Ssi

Pros and cons from a seo point of view

[feeder]

Are there any traps (as far as attaining good rankings are concerned) by making your text link navigation scheme a SSI?

[pageoneresults]

Hey there feeder, I've been using something similar to SSI since I started developing websites over 6 years ago. I use the FrontPage Include component which mimics an SSI and it has presented zero problems.

I've been involved with, and have read many discussions centered around SSI and I honestly believe that they are a very important part of establishing theme. I typically work with a top, left and bottom navigation. Each of those is an Include or SSI. I've also gone as far as building Includes for each main category when appropriate.

I always make sure that my main navigation links appear in all Includes. As you travel further into a site, the includes change based on content but always contain main navigation links.

Go for it! You'll be happy that you did. SSI, Includes, CSS and anything else that you can consolidate and control through central files is the way to go.

[agerhart]

Feeder, I agree with Pageoneresults, that you shouldn't have any problems if you use the SSI for the nav structure. This being said, I have seen some problems arise when other areas of the site are controlled by SSI. When trying to customize each page for their respective keywords, these includes can sometimes get in the way.

[feeder]

Thanks guys.

I suppose my concern was that the spider might not follow links in an include, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

[pageoneresults]

Just run a page through Brett's Search Engine Spider Simulator [searchengineworld.com] and you'll see the results. Keep in mind, that the spider will see the code that is rendered at the browser level. View the source code of those pages, that is what the spider will see.

[mbauser2]

Ow. Question implies misunderstanding of SSI.

SSI stands for server-side include. Inclusion is done by the server before the file is sent to the client. The client doesn't do anything. The client can't identify which parts are includes and which parts are from the base file, because the client only receives one HTML file.

[rogerd]

Feeder, mbauser is right - the browser (or spider) has NO way of telling that content is from SSI. The include is done before the server delivers the content to the browser. From an SEO standpoint, SSI is neither positive nor negative, per se (although SSI may let you implement some SEO-related stuff, like navigation, more easily).

The big advantage of SSI, IMO, is the ability to make changes to standard content (like a page top, a navbar, a footer, etc.) VERY easily. When you get to larger sites, things like updating templates, doing global search and replaces, etc., get very tedious. So does uploading hundreds or thousands of modified pages. With SSI, you can make a change to a tiny file, upload it in a second or two, and bingo - all pages that use that include immediately reflect the new content.

[feeder]

SSI stands for server-side include. Inclusion is done by the server before the file is sent to the client. The client doesn't do anything. The client can't identify which parts are includes and which parts are from the base file, because the client only receives one HTML file.

That's what I was missing. So the server cobbles together the HTML when it gets a request, rather like a database driven site?

[jatar_k]

exactly, then client side all they see is the final product.