Do controllers get crawed by search engines?

if not, i guess one must cache their page and turn common generated
views into static files?

Sure, why shouldn’t they? The search engine doesn’t see any difference
between a static page and a Rails page.

really? my guess was that since views dont get generated till an action
is performed in the controller or model, what is there to crawl? lets
say my controller returns a persons profile from a table…

for example mydomain.com/doctor/name

where name is == henry_gale

a crawler cant get that right because no static page exist for henry
gale?

Andreas S. wrote:

Sure, why shouldn’t they? The search engine doesn’t see any difference
between a static page and a Rails page.

bbqTree wrote:

really? my guess was that since views dont get generated till an action
is performed in the controller or model, what is there to crawl? lets
say my controller returns a persons profile from a table…

for example mydomain.com/doctor/name

where name is == henry_gale

a crawler cant get that right because no static page exist for henry
gale?

Andreas S. wrote:

Sure, why shouldn’t they? The search engine doesn’t see any difference
between a static page and a Rails page.

crawler is not different from web browser. It does not work inside of
your webserver so it does not see the difference between dynamic page
and static page.

What is the difference between
domain.com/person/gale (which is static)
domain.com/person/gale (which is database generated)

Browser cannot see the difference and crawler also cannot.

Gokhan
www.sylow.net

I understand what you’re saying… what they wind up crawling is all
the files (not just the controllers), so they are
scanning .rhtml, .rb, and all the other files on the server. Turns out
they’re mostly meaningless, since there’s no ‘dynamic’ content
generator behind the crawler.

A further question would be: how do you get the search engines to see/
recognize the dynamic content, rather than just the code that will
wind up generating the dynamic content? Say I build a webapp that
stores & displays case studies/book reviews/white papers… is there
any way (short of using the webapp to actually create static pages)
that you can get all your dynamic content searched? I’m guessing the
answer is “no”, but then I’m not an expert at this.

Thanks…jon