links in databases

[steve-parrott]

I've been investing fairly heavily in getting our company profile and link in some industry organization directories. These directories are all database driven and it seems to me that search robots don't see them.

I see referral hits from these sites showing up in my site stats, but it seems that none of the search engines can see them.

Is it true that links hidden in databases are invisible to search engines?

[flood6]

It depends on how it is done.

Every post made on this site is stored in a database. Every properly written hyperlink in each post on this site can be spidered by SEs.

The problem comes when the site uses techniqes similar to redirects for links. An example would be the links section of nearly all PHPNuke sites.

There was a thread I started to exchange links with my old site. I didn't realize this was an issue at the time, but the links were done in such a way that they were not being followed by spiders. Here is that thread and it may help to explain things better than I can.

On the other hand, my new site stores links in a database but when the data is called, the URL's are put right into the href; search engine friendly links.

If I was unclear, let me know, I'll try to explain it better.