Forum Moderators: open
What is the final word on using SSI for your meta tags. I have to admit that this question has come up in my own forums several times, and I am at a loss for how to answer it. I am comfortable using SSI. But how do the spiders feel about it?
I am cool with all that.
What I am interested in knowing is if I serve meta tags via an .inc file, will the spiders be able to read it?
I guess I am just gonna have to do a few tests on my own.
Thanks for the info though! And I love these forums!
J.K. Bowman
Macromdedia Evangelist
With an #INCLUDE statement in .asp you have the choice to declare the file virtually or physically. In either case when the page is delivered there will be no sign that you have used an #INCLUDE statement, ie it will just show the resulting generated HTML.
If the location of your include files were accessible through an http:// address (eg www.mydomain.com/inc/code.inc ) then in theory it could be indexed by the spider.
The solution is to use physical file references pointing to a directory that cannot be accessed by an HTTP request. So long as the web server has the correct permissions for the subdirectory then everything should work fine.
So, web goes in e:\web\domainname\, whilst include file goes into e:\inc\domainname. Web server is mapped to return the e:\web\domainname\ as the root and the include file is physically inaccessible to the spider.
I do this to protect my ASP code rather than inadvertent indexing. BTW, you can serve any part of/or even a complete page using SSI. As Brett says, unless the extension is giving it away, then there is no way to tell.
