Use of Include and search engines

The use of include allows search engines to see the code?

[Maraka]

New to web site development. I am planning a new site and would like to use include clause in the html code to easy maintain header and navigation menues. Will it reduce the visibility of keywords and content for search engines like Google?
Thanks for any advice.

[rocknbil]

Welcome aboard Maraka!

If by include clause you are talking about SSI includes or PHP, no, both of these output the same text to the browser and that's what the search engine will digest, no problem there.

If you do this with Ajax or vanilla Javascript, that content will be less likely to be seen by search engines (though there are some claims it can be seen.) Option A and B are safest.

[Maraka]

I was thinking on using PHP. Thanks for your reply.

[mack]

As rocknbil stated, this won't cause you any problems. Using php will work just fine, and search engines won't even see the includes, all they will see is the finished page.

Lets say you have a file called header.php and it contains the text "this is the header"

you also have a footer page containing "this is the footer"

Within your index page you use the following...

<?php
include "header.php";
echo"this is the index page";
include "footer.php";
?>

All the search engine will see is...

this is the header
this is the index page
this is the footer

Mack.