SEO Tycoon

**RL4422** · 10-13-2008, 05:09 PM

About a two months ago, I removed my flash menus from my website and repalced them with basic click link menus. I figured they would be easier for search engines to pick up on. However to simplify my life, I created the menu in an includes file and I just use that code to place the menu's on my site.

I added an article and website summary to the front page as well. Traffic has dropped! I have only been doing this for a couple of years, but I always though adding content and simplifying your content made things better. Any ideas?

http://www.everybodysbestfriend.com is the website in question. THANKS in advance guys!

**wayfarer07** · 10-13-2008, 06:22 PM

Makes no difference, whether you use included files or not. As far as search engines are concerned, your site is just static HTML.

**vangogh** · 10-13-2008, 11:10 PM

Search spiders will see your files after they php engine has parsed them. Search engines will see the same thing if you use the includes or if the html was directly on the page.

However I'm guessing your URLs have changed. Just a hunch, but were the pages .html when you used the Flash menu and now they're .php because of the includes? If that's the case (or if the URLs are different in another way) then to search engines you have completely new pages. From a search engine perspective you have brand new pages and any links you had pointing to the old .html URLs are no longer pointing to the new .php URLs.

Again I'm just guessing at what happened. If I'm right you'll want to use 301 redirects to point the old URLs to the new URLs. Things won't return back to where they were immediately, but in time all the links, etc will be transferred to the new php pages.

**zingsus01** · 10-14-2008, 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

Makes no difference, whether you use included files or not. As far as search engines are concerned, your site is just static HTML.

ok, search engine same a browser, spider craw HTML only

**juhasan** · 10-14-2008, 09:04 PM

Are you talking about PHP "includes" - if yes, then it won't hurt SE bots, because bots can see only html meaning PHP compiler already compiled the coding and transform includes file's coding to html.

Or if you are talking about external javascript files - then it has good effect on SEO. SEO Gurus advice to keep javascript, css in external files to simplify bots crawling.