Search engines and external nav files

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 [url]www.azonix.com[/url] 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!

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