Crawlers and Frames

[Jon_King]

Help me understand in a 3 frame page, which frame code is crawled by the search engine spiders?

[luma]

Normally, the frameset page, e.g., index.html gets crawled first. Some search engines will follow the links in the frame tag, others won't. Make sure to add content and links to the noframes area.

Do a site search [searchengineworld.com] on the topic and read Search Engines And Frames [searchenginewatch.com].

[rewboss]

Always, always, always have a <noframes> in your frameset. On the rare occasions that I use frames, I usually do the following:

1. In the <frameset>, the <noframes> includes a brief description of the site, perhaps a short message saying "This site is best navigated with a browser that can use frames" and links to the main pages of the site.

2. On the content pages, some rudimentary navigation.

This approach works best, I find, with linear navigation: for example, a series of tutorials. The navigation frame shows all the pages so you can jump to any page you like, while the content pages have simple "Previous", "Next" and "Home" links. The "Home" link points to the frameset.

This has the following advantages:

1. Search engines have a fair chance of being able to index the whole site.
2. SE results pages don't show a "Your browser doesn't support frames" message. See this results page [google.com] for example.
3. Visitors who have jumped "sideways" from a SE direct to a content page can choose to navigate in a linear style or load the frameset; at least they can navigate, even if it is a bit tricky.
4. Non-frames browsers can also navigate the site -- for example, Lynx can sort of do framed sites, but it's much easier when you have links on the content pages.

If anyone's interested, I have a half-finished (private) project which uses frames. Send me a sticky for the temporary URL. (It's called the Web Design Chamber of Horrors, by the way.)