Search engines and external nav files

[Rattify]

My boss's client had another firm redesign their site, and now the search engine listing is terrible. They came back to us and we are trying to fix the damage but aren't sure exactly what the problem is since they changed a number of things.

The site is www.azonix.com and the navigational areas are external files that are called for in the html (like it does for a CSS stylesheet). This doesn't always show in the "view source" but it's the case. The code looks like this:

<?php include("include.footer.html"); ?>

and that code will call up the text navigation at the bottom of the page. We are wondering if maybe search spiders can't use this and are getting stuck. Does anyone know whether spiders can follow navigational links that are in an external file?

Thank you!

[wamboid]

I'm no expert on what the spiders do, but here is my recent experience. I changed our company website to use php includes much like that. At the same time, I changed it from it's ancient table layout to total css. Probably more because of the better semantic markup than anything, our search rankings have drastically improved. The front page had always done well on some keywords, but now obscure pages deep in the site are getting picked up using keywords I hadn't even expected. So, I wouldn't think that php includes for the nav should hurt anything.