convert database info to html

[tcjay]

I would like to embed the text from a database into an html web page so when the search engine spiders come to visit they find the text from the guestbook/ discussion board. Does anyone have any ideas. I know that when I have down searches I have seen enteries from guestbooks/ forums.

Is it possible?

TIA

Tom :)

[kriviere]

Search engine spiders have no more access to your site than do other users. If your site is set up to serve up html pages which include data from guestbook/discussion board then I would expect that they would see it. Are you wanting to serve your pages up differently for the spiders? Maybe a long page with hundreds of discussion board messages displayed so that it will all be indexed, whereas for people browsing you might limit to 10 or 20 messages? I guess you could check the IP from which the request is coming if you know the IPs of the spiders. I'm just not sure I understand what you're attempting to do.

-JoKeR

[tcjay]

I would like the posting to appear in Google when a search is performed. The entries are text but stored in a database and dI am not sure if search engines read text stored in databasess.

[kriviere]

Like I said, google has no more access to your site than your users do. If your users can see the text of the messages, then I guess Google could too. I won't pretend to speak for what Google or any search engine does. It isn't clear to me if they try to follow all links they encounter, in which case it would follow "next screen" links and eventually see all of your messages. Google can't see directly into your database any more than your users can. However, if there are ways that your users can routinely pull up messages, then I suppose Google should be able to, too.

I would think that you wouldn't want to show the search engines anything different than what your users would see. Otherwise when a search on the engine produces a link to your site it will be linked to the page as seen by the search engine spider, but if you show them something different from what the user sees, then when the user tries to follow the link they will be taken to a different page than they expected (or possibly even no page, 500 error).

I don't believe the search engines accept submissions of just raw data that is available on your site. They want the actual urls that will pull up standard html output (whether generated by cgi scripts or vanilla .html files shouldn't matter) and they will index those web pages as they think is best. I'm not sure how you would want it to work any differently than that.

-JoKeR