Search Engines and SSI

How do spiders handle Server Side Includes?

[Outtatheblue]

How do spiders handle Server Side Includes? To they just find a link to the content, or do they see the rendered page for indexing?

[oilman]

Welcome to WMW.

SSI is handled server side and the spiders will only see the rendered HTML.

[bobriggs]

And they will not see the last-modified date in the response header unless you use the XBitHack method.

I don't know what the implications of the Last-Modified header missing are. NL will put "date not available" and I don't know what future date AV would put on it ;)

[Outtatheblue]

Thanks guys. I guess my question is whether or not using SSIs are going to hurt my search engine rankings?

[theperlyking]

The short answer is no they wont hurt your rankings.

[wangdy]

Although a different spin on the same topic... Novice question...
Am I correct to say that a spider does not crawl a site unless it is submitted to a search engine (google, altavista)?