Search Engine Question

A while ago I created a basic website with multiple pages (main,contact,faq etc) - mainly as a way of testing PHP since I was learning it. My background is mainframe programming (COBOL) and I am very hot on generic and structured programming. The website actually only had 1 page - called main - and when you clicked on a link (say FAQ) it linked to main?a=1 - the PHP in 'main' used the parameter to build the page by extracting the necessary data from SQL tables. Although this was pretty nifty I suspected (and correct me if I'm wrong) that search engines can't index these pages because they don't physically exist. I actually tried adding adsense but no meaningful ads were displayed - presumably because, until the page is built and displayed, it doesn't actually exist as far as google is concerned.

My question is this:-

If I have a page (let's call it 'PAGEA') with a link physically coded in the HTML then I assume google would count that as a link.
If I have a second page ('PAGEB') where the link is extracted from an SQL table, would google still be able to 'see' this link. In both cases if you view the page source they are identical, since obviously the PHP is not visible, just the extracted data.
Basically, do the search engines see the page as a user would (i.e. fully built) or does it see the physical HTML code.

As a supplemental question, article directories, such as Article Dashboard (which I flirted with temporarily) get their pages indexed. But I can't believe they physically create a new page for each and every article - that would run into thousands - and I'm sure when I ran one it didn't create thousands of pages in my web directory.. Or do they? If not, how do they do it? Is there a way of creating a URL without actually creating a physical page until that page is viewed?

Hope all that makes sense and I'm not just being particularly stupid.

Thanks for your time.

Regards

 

- if the links are up on the page and visible then google will crawl and index them, remember that shouldn't be in a javascript.
- 99% of current generations sites are running with help of databases, there will be no static html pages in the server.
- if you are looking for a simple blog/site then best to use is wordpress.