Include Content

Does the content of includes get cached/spidered?

[lbombardier]

I'm a bit of a newb with using includes and was wondering if there is a definitive answer on whether or not the html content in includes are picked up by google? I suspect it does, but wanted to be sure.

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, lbombardier.

You're right -- spiders can't tell that the server put together the page from included pieces. Includes are private business on the server and search engine spiders can't tell what happens behind the scene. No user agent can.

[jeek]

OK, Google can't see the actual include directives, but if you're using includes to generate pages dynamically it can see if the page content keeps changing.

Also, won't it either get either no last-modified or a wrong last-modified time? (i.e. either never see a 304 or see 304 incorrectly?)

-- jeek

[g1smd]

Depends how you have set up your server...

[jeek]

In any way in particular? I recently changed some parts of one of my sites to use SSI to include some repeated static HTML (menus mainly) and Google seems to now ignore these pages and the Apache log shows it only ever sees 200 responses.

Is there a way to force Apache to return 304 for shtml pages where the file hasn't changed on disk?

-- jeek