html in frames

[rysolag]

hi

are html documents inside frames less likely to be crawled by search engines?

[tedster]

Well, that's not really an html question, it's more of a search engine marketing question. But as a quick answer, my experience says there's no problem today and has not been for several years. Search engines figured out how to spider framed content a while ago.

In fact, today you need to plan for traffic coming from the search engines directly to a frame document that is orphaned from its parent frameset.

Also I want to say that sites where I have removed frames and converted the content to "flat" pages have performed better (by far!) -- but the search engine traffic issue isn't the reason, it's user friendliness.

[rainborick]

If search engines ever had problems crawling frames-based sites, they overcame that limitation at least 3 or 4 years ago. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all crawl frames just fine and, contrary to the popular myth, framed sites can actually rank competitively. So, there are no issues in getting search engines to crawl frames-based sites.

The problems you will encounter center around the fact that the search engines think of each page as an entity unto itself with no regard for the <frameset> page in which they are designed to be viewed by users. This has two implications: (1) The links users will see in the search engine results pages will point directly at the individual pages, so you need to take steps to accomodate the situation by adding some JavaScript to each page to automatically reload the requested page into its proper <frameset>, and provide a direct link to the <frameset> page for those running with JavaScript disabled. (2) The link structure of frames-based sites is usually very different from that of a conventional site. You should make sure that the <frameset> page has a <noframes> section with descrete links to the most important pages within the <frameset> to judiciously distribute PageRank/Link Popularity through the site, and also add some keyword-rich content for the search engines to feed on. Further, you need to consider adding some basic navigation links to each framed page both to in order to help users, and to provide PageRank/Link Popularity distribution.

Having said all this, I would strongly recommend that you look into alternatives to frames. While you can reduce the problems they cause, you simply can't overcome all of them and even the solutions I suggest here are far from perfect. Many people turn to frames to make it easy to update navigation links. There are several alternatives that are friendlier to both users and search engines. The best of them involve using some server-side scripting with Server Side Includes (SSI) or software solutions. If you're reluctant to use those methods, a good compromise is to use an <iframe> to hold the navigation links and its all done in HTML that all contemporary browsers support. Good luck!

[tedster]

If the conversion to a non-framed site is going to be too much work to be immediately practical, you can also check out this javascript that will force the orphan pages into their frameset (if the browser has javascript working, that is)

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