Do cold fusion pages get search engine placement?

[John_Thomas2]

I'm new to cold fusion. I've been reading a couple of books. Following the layout ideas in one of those books I have developed a small cold fusion site. Nothing much to speak of and very basic. My homepage is a straight .html file (good for search engines). However, following the layout of the book, all of the rest of my pages are .cfm.

I use a "sitewrapper" which creates my header, left side, right side and footer automatically for each .cfm page. The content (which goes between the left and right) is .cfm files. All of the copy for each page is in the included files.

So my question is this: will search engines index the .cfm pages when they are "included" from another page? I don't really know how SEs work in that do they read the file in each page (.cfm or .html) or is it the "combined" output that the browser sees/outputs?

I would have to have to hardcode all of the individual pages in order to return a higher SE placement if that can be avoided. Each "section" has a separate header/footer based on what section the user is in.

Thank you in advance for any and all help/advice you can give. It is very much appreciated.

CF noob trying to learn ...

[ilssac]

Search engines index ColdFusion, ASP, JSP or any other type of page just fine.  They index what is returned by a request for a specific URL no matter how that response is generated.

[John_Thomas2]

Great. I wasn't sure about have <cfmodules> calling the content pages and whether or not that would effect SEs. Thank you for the answer.

Now I just have to figure out how to get the page to load correctly if they type in the URL (because the content pages are buried several directories down).

Thank you again for the information.

[tclaremont]

By the time the spider "sees" the page, it is strictly HTML. The fact that it was generated by ColdFusion is moot.

[StoneRoseDesigndotcom]

That is true, the page content is html...however the URL matters...why not use a meaningful keyword in the URL if you can... .cfm?MemberID=1234 vs. .cfm?Cat9ID45=1234

[ilssac]

How does it work if they don't type in the url?

I.E. ColdFusion has no idea how a request was generated.  Just that there is a request and that here are instructions (CFML) on how to build a response.

The browser, one very common source of requests, has no idea where ColdFusion is getting the response from.  All it knows is that the response has arrived with instructions (HTML) on how it should display data.

In the middle there is a web server, often IIS or Appache, that has been told if a request for ColdFusion stuff (.cfm, .cfc, .cfr, etc) come in, hand that off to the ColdFusion Application server.  When it gets the response from ColdFusion it passes it back to the client that made the request.

This is the basic flow of data no matter how the requests are generated or where the responses are sent.  I.E. AJAX xmlHTTPrequests(), web services, robots, etc.