Hi John,
>My question is: Do search engines fire off each page the same as a browser and thus run the PHP code that will create all the product links? Meta Tags, etc. Or, do I need to generate full static pages or somewhere in between? I can't seem to find any definite answers.
Google executes all server side code (PHP, etc.). However, most web crawlers only support a limited set of client side scripting such as JavaScript. If you application relies heavily on JavaScript, its dynamic content might not get indexed. There are also limitations of what links search engine folllow. The will follow static links (
http://server.com/app/somepage.php), but they won't necessarily follow dynamic links such as
http://server.com/main.php?action=somepage&scope=app.
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Christof