Links effect page rank. But what if I had a php script that prints out a link? Does that have the same effect on page rank? Like, say a page rank 10 website links to your website. That'll do good things for you of course. But what if that website is pulling the link from a database? Does the google crawler know how to excecute scripts to pull those same links out?
The Google crawler will only see the links when they are rendered to the page through PHP. The links will be formatted into valid HTML before the bot sees them.
Great response and I agree that the bot will only see the rendered links. That's why database programing is not especially good from an seo point of view, but obviously excellent from a functionality perspective, especially for users.
The technology that creates the page doesn't matter to the search engines. You can create the page in static HTML, php, jsp, asp, or anything else, but the end result is that all those technologies spew HTML. The search engines (and web browsers) make a request to the page and get back HTML so links from any technology look like a static link to the search engines.