Robots and mod_rewrite()

Question

I'm using mod_rewrite to redirect some pages to the right page:

site.com/name1 becomes site.com/profiles.php/name1

Options -Indexes

RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [NC] 
RewriteRule .* - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profiles.php/$1 [QSA,L]

I would like all these pages to be discoverable by robots like Google etc. But as the file doesn't really exist, I suppose robots don't go in it ? How can I make this work for robots ? Or am I wrong and do robots find all these pages ?

Answer 1

Robots behave simiar to webbrowsers. If a regular browser can see a page, so can a robot. Bots do not know whether the file exists or not. They care about what the server serves them.