Databases and search engines

[PaulHerschell]

My site uses ASP to interogate databases to display the content on certain pages.

Question 1 - If information is returned from a database rather than hard coded HTML, for example, does it get catalogued in the search engines or is it ignored because the crawlers do not crawl database contents?

Question 2 - What commands do I use in web pages to say 'yes you can crawl this pages and use in the search engine' and 'no do not crawl this page, it is not relevant'.

Any help appreciated

Thanks

Paul

 

[tviman]

The only thing that spiders will look at are HTML pages. They have no way of knowing about your databases.

As far as how to tell the spiders what, and what not to look at, do a google meta tags. There are several things you can use - depends on what you want to do.

There's always a better way. The fun is trying to find it!

 

[PaulHerschell]

Tviman,

Thanks for the quick response. Just to clarify though, I appreciate that spiders can only spider HTML, however, with ASP (and I assume similar scripting tools) the concept is that they run and generate pure HTML to output in the browser. If my ASP page opens a database and displays a record'c contents the result is pure HTML code. Are you saying that spiders cannot read the HTML generated by a script? I suspected that was the case but want to be totally sure.

Yes done a google on meta tags and it comes up with a lot I already know but a few new things since I last visited the area and also advice about other search optimisation techniques. An obvious approach that should have occurred to me earlier!

Thanks again

Paul

 

[ChrisHirst]

Paul both your questions should be in the SEO forum forum828.

take a read in there it's been covered a few times.

btw ASP sends HTML to the browser so the spider doesn't 'see' your code.



Chris.

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[PaulHerschell]

Thanks. Didn't realise that forum existed. Looks very useful.

Paul