One of the tenets of good site architecture is avoiding frames. While they may look nice, they’ve only spelled trouble in the past from an SEO perspective. If you have a bunch of great content wrapped up in frames, nobody would be able to find it since search engine spiders could not crawl frames.
That is of course you’re very knowledgeable and know how you can both have frames and an easy-crawlable site.
To clarify, a frame is actually an HTML element that pulls content from another URL and directs it to a URL of your choice…in a non-technical sense, frames essentially copy everything on a page to mirror it on another page. There are some good reasons why you would want to use frames…just be careful on how you use them to ensure your site indeed gets crawled by the search engine spiders.
Use specific tags in your HTML code to ensure framed content gets indexed
It’s not that Google and Bing don’t index content within a <frameset> tag but what usually occurs is the search engines will index framed and non-framed content separately and catalogue them as two separate pages.
Viewing frames as images is a good way to look at them. If you absolutely must use frames, you should provide a keyword-rich description of the image in case it doesn’t load. The <noframe> tag explains to users and search engines what the framed content is if it fails to load.
<noframes>Put your keyword-rich frame describing content here.</noframes>
Two important things to consider when using <noframes>: (1) place them as high up on the page as possible so it’s easily readable by search engine spiders and users whose browsers don’t support frames and (2) be sure the <noframe> tag is outside the <frames> or <iframes> tag. If it isn’t, that content may not get picked up by the search engine spiders.
Another “frames” tag for that’s gaining a lot of popularity is the <iframe> tag. It’s used to embed dynamic information and a wide variety of widgets on a site…Facebook’s “Like” button/widget is one common use for an <iframe> tag.
Many who use <iframe> though don’t realize that it doesn’t generate a link back to their site – which is one of the main reasons to use the tag in the first place.
Fortunately, there is a way to get that link by setting up the code as indexable content with the <iframe> tag. Setting up the code in the following way will get the content and any links indexed.
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:150px; height:50px;” allowTransparency=”true”>
Content, and links will get indexed here by most engines as it is visible text on the page. Anything that is pulled in using the iframe tag, will not get indexed with the page. So if you want your iframe powered widgets to generate a link back to your site, make sure and include that code in this area.
</iframe>
Generally speaking, we avoid frames on sites we work with if at all possible since it’s very difficult to ensure the content is indexed by the search engines and readable by our users. <Iframe> tags on the other hand can be a good method of building links when they’re used properly.