I know this is kinda dumb, but...
If I have a php script that builds a page via query to display a list of locations and descriptions for each page of the site, will search engines pick up the query or the results?
In truth, I don't know anything about SEO, so, as dumb as this question is, hopefully someone here can kinda break it down a little bit for me...
You can answer that question empirically by watching your apache logs to see which pages the bots ask for when they comb your site.
Both, in as much as it'll associate the "query" (which in this case I'm taking to be the URL of the script) and the resulting HTML spat out by that query.
As an SEO related thing.. if you're building a list of all that pages on your site with that script anyway, you may as well convert it into a Site Map which is a search engine friendly description of all the pages on your site (that you want indexing).
Use URL rewriting (mod_rewrite if you use Apache as a Webserver)
This lets you turn query URLs such as
http://mysite.com/location.php?region=US&state=PA&city=Philadelphia
to search-engine friendly ones like
http://mysite.com/location/US/PA/Philadelphia/