SEO and HTML FRAMES
Almost all SEO experts state that the use of frames inhibit the effectiveness of SEO. This seems highly unlikely, since a spider reads every web page as text that is parsed for particular data. What is more likely is that the use of frames, being as complicated as it has always been, is difficult to use without errors. Those errors, when encountered by a spider (or a web browser), will cause the parsing of the page to be aborted, and that results in failed indexing below the point of the error. With that said, and the door opened for criticism, let me point out that there are certain uses for frames that are not good for SEO.
Flash, while it is widely popular, and easily interactive, is a no-spider zone. If you are going to use Flash, position it carefully on the page, and define it in such a way that spiders will still be able to glean the links and associations that are embedded within the Flash section. Flash programming is best reserved for use on internal pages, leaving the main page free of these problems.
The most important issue of using frames is the degree of complication they introduce to a page. Since each frame on a page is effectively a brand new web page, maintaining the interactive uses of frames without becoming confused can be a daunting task. Frames link back and forth on a single page, and great care should be taken to not lose track of which frame points to what location. Another major problem is that a
spider or human who arrives at a frame from another source will have no contextual basis for continuing to index the entire site, and many links on that frame will likely no longer be functional, meaning that spiders have nowhere to go, and consider the page as truncated, or even completely invalid. Be certain that anyone arriving at an individual frame are redirected to the top of the frameset, and the page will be displayed as it was intended. This can be done through the use of page redirection in your .htaccess file, and SHOULD be done there, not through other HTML coding.
By avoiding Flash as much as possible, carefully checking your code to reduce errors, and using proper redirection to keep your pages looking the way they were meant to look, you are free to use frames without any adverse effects in your search engine ratings. The best advice is to avoid using frames unless you are extremely well versed in their usage, using tables or CSS coding to accomplish you needs, instead. But if you are determined to use frames, feel free to do so, and without worry that you will be penalized for having used them.
Article written by SEOnotepad.com
4 Comments Received
August 15th, 2008 @9:04 pm
Frames aren’t what web spiders look for. If we see any page with a text browser like Lynx, we can notice that it skips text parsed in iFrames, so it is better to use div tags for the purpose. Also Sometime back Google reported that it is able to crawl flash. It is yet to be seen how much google crawls it.
August 16th, 2008 @9:41 pm
Flash can be optimized but in general it is not known how well it can be crawled or what algorithms are used, there are SEO techniques for Flash but it is more optimization of code and the page.
August 18th, 2008 @6:09 am
I have never really liked frames and have never incorporated them in my sites’ designs. Until now I did not know that they might not be a very good idea for SEO. Just another reason why I should not be using them
August 19th, 2008 @6:14 am
Yea, Frankly it was more of weird scenario where in you had faced a website made using Frames. Most of the cases the frames clearly looked out of the proportions of the websites. You can clearly demarcate the frame borders in just a single Page reloads, and when such things were implemented using AJAX it looked much cleaner.
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