[NetRodent]

Originally posted by Cyndalie
Differences of opinion are great. But you cannot say i'm wrong on this point:

"100% wrong. A search engine sees exactly what you see when you view the source of your page. There's no way for a spider to see the "uploaded" version of the page. A search engine's spider makes the same type of HTTP request as a browser, so it sees exactly the same thing. "

You misunderstand. A search engine see's what you see when you view source on a page when you are looking at it from the server and not from the web.

Perhaps we aren't quite speaking the same language. When you say "looking at it from the server" you mean you see the raw html (same as "view source"), our disagreement is just over language. However, if you are implying that a search engine can see what a page looks like before it is served (ie <!--#element attribute=value attribute=value>), I'm going to have to continue to disagree with you. Its just not possible, includes are parsed by the server before they are delivered to the client.

Originally posted by Cyndalie
"I don't think your problem is includes. "

View source of http://SmutDrs.com - every peice of code on that site is from an include, there is 0 static content on the page, including the head and foot tags. I know it is includes and cfm plugins, I have seen the source. In order to optimize the head tags they had to optimize the content in the included file, so although you can see it from the web, when you look at the page on the server, all you see it the include tags, and NOT the actual head code content. The reason why they are the same on every page is because ITS PULLING FROM THE SAME INCLUDE HEADER FILE! If it seems stuffed it's because they tried to manually intergrate the metas on top of the includes. The only pages they can get this site to rank are doorways and non-dymanic pages. Cold Fusion has alot more problems than PHP and ASP, for sure!

I did view the source of SmutDrs.com, and what I saw is exactly what any search engine spider would see (unless you're cloaking, but that's a completely different discussion). I'll take your word that the page is made up of includes and cold fusion plugins, but just by looking at the source, I couldn't tell and neither could a spider.

I brought up your title and meta tags, not to discuss how they were included in the final html document but to suggest that possibly you weren't ranking because you repeat the same words over and over and it looks spammy. There is no technical or moral reason for a search engine not to rank a page made with cold fusion. However, there is a very good reason not to rank a page that has spammy headers and little body text.

Originally posted by Cyndalie
I did not suggest to abuse hidden code, but to rather integrate indexable content relevant to your site as best into your indexable code as possible. Ideally you do not want to use includes to manage and supply textual content.

I really don't see any techincal reason not to use includes (aside from issues of server load). Most of my search engine pages are entirely dynamic (aside from the layout and most of the graphics) and they are indexed and ranked no differently than static pages. As far as the search engine is concerned they are static pages (even down to the .html extension).

Originally posted by Cyndalie
My testing over the past 3 months has shown that SE's are still unable to spider includes as content for the source page they are indexing for ranking.

That's very interesting, but I don't see how its possible. A spider cannot know what is an include and what isn't. The document is assembled on the server before the spider can see it. I'll gladly eat my hat if you can show me how a spider could tell the difference. Can you point to any third party experiments that support your assertion?

Originally posted by Cyndalie
Includes can be useful when use for grahical content, this lightens the source code so your actual text content stands out which can help your rankings.. - however with SmutDrs.com there is NO static text or HTML on the site whatsoever, no matter how it appears when viewed from the web. Many sites use both, just optmize the html static content around your includes and you should do great!

Includes are handled before a page is served to the client, so they can't "lighten the source code" as far as a spider is concerned. Spiders
see exactly the same thing a browser sees. They issue the exact same http requests. Search Engines do not have a "magic" way of seeing anything other than what the web server sends to them.

Look through your log files and compare the byte count of a page served to a spider with the byte count of a page served to a regular user. Unless your includes spit out different results depending the time of day, the ip address or useragent of the client, or some other random element, the byte counts will be exactly the same.

Originally posted by Cyndalie
Appreciate your imput NetRodent, however I have been doing full time SEO for the past 5 years and have worked with all kinds of sites, designs, and programming languages. I would not mislead someone or suggest something that I did not learn from experience.

We've been the search engine game about the same amount of time. I don't think you would intentionally try to mislead someone, however you are saying things that don't match with my experiences, what I have read of other people's experiences, and things that are just technically not possible. Just because you can't get a page that uses includes ranked, doesn't mean includes are the reason.