barney

I have read that search engines have problems with dynamically generated
pages (such as from a mysql database) and usually ignore these.
I use a load of PHP includes in my site and was wondering if as they are
only including data from text files wether this is going to cause a problem
or will the spiders just view the pages as normal html pages?
The text is basically html formatted text (easier to update a text file than
rewrite the site again due to new content).
thanks for your time

barney

From the point of view of a search engine there are some problems with
dynamic pages (whether it comes from a database or not is really
irrelevant).
First, is example.com/foo?id=123 the same or different to
example.com/foo?id=124 ?
Secondly, dynamic pages may change on every visit and thus there's no
point in indexing them.
Thirdly, some sites are written in such a way that search engine
robots can get sucked into an infinite web of dynamically generated
URLs.
So traditionally some search engines haven't indexed certain pages
based on what their URLs contain. This is why some sites use systems
that rewrite ?id=234 as /234/

But this does not mean that search engines exclude all dynamically
generated pages. Search engines have become more sophisticated over
the years (though they still have a long way to go in many areas) and
will now index many pages that they ignored five years ago.

>I use a load of PHP includes in my site and was wondering if as they are
>only including data from text files wether this is going to cause a problem
>or will the spiders just view the pages as normal html pages?


You almost certainly won't have any problems with that.