Does text outputted to a page from an sql database appear in search engines?

Question

I'm working on improving SEO for my website, and one of the ways I want to drive traffic to my site is by writing a blog.

Every post of my blog is saved to my sql database, then outputted on my website using PDO fetching, yada yada yada. It's nothing too complicated, just getting the content of each post from the database as a php variable and outputting it as text in html.

Once the content has been retrieved from the sql database, it looks something like this:

<div...>
    <p>$blog_content</p>
</div>

So, when it comes down to it, my blog is generated from just one file, called 'blog.php', and each post can be viewed individually by entering blog.php?id=X .

I've also used htaccess to create vanity urls as follows:

• foo.com/blog/admin <-- Shows all posts by the user 'admin' (me)
• foo.com/blog/admin/1 <-- Shows post with 'id' equal to '1'

Every post links to this second vanity url if you click on its title.

Here's the big question: As far as search engines are concerned, does my blog exist? Is google (and are other search engines) going to be able to find my blog, both in /blog/admin (where every post is listed and can be scrolled through) and in the individual pages (Example: post1 -> foo.com/blog/admin/1)? In other words, if I search for the exact contents of my blog post, will it show up in a search engine in either of these vanity pages -- and if so, how long will it be before it shows up?

Answer 1

As long as you have links (internal or external) pointing to the (vanity) URLs, they should be found by Google. Keep in mind that a page that nobody links to, nor is available in your sitemap is highly unlikely to ever be found.

To answer a question you might be having right now: in all likelihood Google will not be randomly incrementing your post numbers like foo.com/blog/admin/2, foo.com/blog/admin/3 after it somehow landed on foo.com/blog/admin/1 in order to look for additional content.

You would, however, also need some validation (most often in the form of external links) to motivate Google to start crawling your website. Alternatively, you can use Google Search Console to manually have Google index your pages.