question about search engines and php

[perry]

Hello, I keep reading where php called content can be read by search engines.

What I don't understand though is search engines usually search our pages when they are in our ftp accounts and not when they are online. Tell me if I am wrong.

Since the php has to be online for it to execute, how can the search engines read the content the php calls? Was hoping someone who writes search engine software might know the answer to this, and since I use zoom....Thanks.

[David]

Most search engines including can Zoom 'spider' your web web site. Meaning that it requests the PHP pages from the server, which are then executed on the server. So Zoom can index the output of the PHP script, rather than the source code of the PHP script.

Zoom also has the option of indexing offline content however. But this option is not so good for indexing PHP pages.

[perry]

I'm afraid you lost me, hope you don't mind answering one more question to clear it up. For example lets say I have something like this on "this.php" page.

<?php
php script that calls "example1.php" web page
?>

Are you saying that some search engines can read the source code of page "example1.php" even if "this.php" page is not online, but sitting in an ftp account? Please let me know, thanks a lot.

[David]

Your example is not really clear, nor detailed enough to give a concise answer.

Maybe you should start by doing a bit of background reading about what PHP is & how FTP works. We have some information about what PHP is here. But there is an enormous amount of information online about this.

[Ray]

As David suggested, the questions you're asking sound a bit confused and is also too vague and ambigious for us to really answer correctly. Some research would probably help you clarify what you're asking exactly.

What I don't understand though is search engines usually search our pages when they are in our ftp accounts and not when they are online. Tell me if I am wrong.

Most search engines use spiders to crawl a website (as Zoom does, with the "Spider mode" option). They do not look in your FTP accounts for files. Zoom allow you to use "Offline mode" to index the files directly from your hard disk folders, but not via FTP.

A spider generally works by making HTTP requests to the server, just like someone sitting at a computer with a browser. In other words, the spider indexes and scans a page as a visitor to your website would see it. This is why a PHP page can be indexed and scanned, despite whatever internal PHP calls it might be making. The spider never sees the internal files, it only sees the resultant page that is presented to the user. This is also what a spider can only locate files on a web site by following the links on the page. It can not find files on your web server which are not linked to via your web pages.

I hope that helps somewhat.