Are SEs parsing SSI'd files?

Will they read and index my menu page?

[Dan_Vendel]

Hi,

I've been searching in vane for an answer to a pretty vital question that popped up yesterday:

I'm usually buildning sites (static) with the menu in a separate file SSI'd inte the pages. Will the SEs find and understand the tag
<!--#include file="../resources/menu.shtml" -->?

I mean, when viewing the page's source code in a regular browser, the menu's code will show up as if it were included in the page from start, so to speak. But will the spiders see it the same way? Or do I need to fgure out something else here?

Insights, viewpoints or suggestions of any kind is welcome.

TIA
Dan

[Shannon]

I'm 99.9% sure that the spiders render the html output, they know the results of your includes, just like a browser does, so you have nothing to worry about there.

[PCInk]

The spiders know nothing about the includes - they never see the include statement.

It is a SERVER SIDE include, so any request for the page will have your server doing all the hard work and returning all the included files to the browser or spider as one standard HTML file.

The includes will be indexed.

[Dan_Vendel]

Thanks both!

Dan

[brucec]

So the search engines only see what is equivalent to the page source in IE?

[PCInk]

Yes. They see what the server sends them, which is the same as view source in current versions of IE.

[zyshen]

does ASP "include" work the same way?

[arrowman]

Yes, this is true with all server-side page generators (SSI, ASP, PHP, JSP, ...): the SE is a web client and sees only the generated page.

[sfxmystica]

To be more precise ... the SE doesn't see the site like IE or Opera or Mozilla, but rather like the text browser Lynx ...

[rominosj]

So, from a SEO point of view, is it beneficial to have your menu in SSI?

I have read that the closer your text is to the top of the page, the easier for SEs to crawl and index the text and you can accomplish this with SSI, right? But, does it help for better ranking?

Romino

[Dan_Vendel]

Rominosj,

No, it doesn't matter for the SE ranking. It's just easier to change/upload one file (the menu) when you're making changes to the site that requires new links in the menu.

If I e.g. add a page and have the menu included in all pages, I would need to change and upload them all.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all for elaborate replies!

Cheers,
Dan