SE's and IFrame's

Can they find my navigation?

[crxchaos]

Hi all,

I've already made more than a few improvements to my site and code thanks to WW over the past week but the time has come for me to stop lurking and ask a question:

I have recently updated my smallish site so that every page imports the site navigation/menu from another file via an iframe. I thought this would be such a clever idea as it saves me updating every single file if I ever need to change any of the url's, for example. It also reduces file sizes and download size.

Being a control freak I instructed robots.txt to deny access to the navigation file so that it would not be listed in SERP's. But now I'm concerned that the SE's have no way to navigate and index the main sections of my site.

Are the spiders able to extract the links from the content of the IFrame and therefore index my site with this set up or do I need to remove the robots.txt instruction?

[oilman]

if you've blocked in robots.txt then they certainly won't pick it up. If you're wanting to only have to update one file then I would use an SSI instead of an iframe anyday.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

[Ryan8720]

I recommend you stay away from iframes. They are unpredictable in anything other than IE.

If it's disallowed in robots.txt, then a robot will completely ignore it. Use SSI or PHP. Or as a last resort, frames. Although I would wait till XHTML 2.0 and use XFrames.

[crxchaos]

<blushes> Of course, I can't beleive I was so daft not to see that! That's what I get for trying to think at 02:47. </blushes>

I've tested the iframe and not found any problems with the browsers that visit my site so I'm going to keep it and just allow the bots into the nav page with a script to jump to the index if anyone tries to load the nav page alone.

Thanks for the welcome despite my blunderous first post :o)

[StanBo]

Ryan8720, Iframe WAS unstable in some of the browsers a couple of years ago, but now it's no longer the case.

And spiders do extract the links from Iframes. In fact Google bot even manages to index sites advertised on your pages via iframe-based banner code :)