Does Google index IFRAME contents within page?

Please share your experience!

[Sharper]

I'm in the process of creating a new site and am trying to do it in the least manual-work intensive process possible while still being search-engine friendly.

To this end I have for a page structure, as an example:

Header section in normal page body (includes text relevent to content)
Iframe with src=<text/images generated from content management database using HTTP call>
Google Iframe within the above iframe for Adsense
Footer section in normal page body (includes more text relevent to content)

I've heard of some issues with MediaBot only seeing content in the same frame that the Adsense ads are in, so I plan on adding the javascript adsense iframe within the main content iframe to help it target the ads better.

I also understand that the regular GoogleBot sometimes will spider and display in SERPS a partial frame of an old-style framed site and I want to avoid that effect.

What I'm wondering is if I use an iframe as described above, when Google spiders the page, will it treat the entire page (header, footer and database content iframe) as one entity for indexing purposes, or as two different pages somehow?

I want it to treat it all as one page, but I'd like to avoid creating a complicated SSI or cgi lash-up to put each page together on demand server-side when I can use a pretty simple iframe to accomplish the same thing. It would help me with performance/caching as well to do it this way.

Thanks ahead of time for any experience you care to share.

[edited by: ciml at 12:20 pm (utc) on Sep. 6, 2003]
[edit reason] Please see Sticky. [/edit]

[Arnett]

I don't know how it will look in the cache but I'm told that Googlebot hates and won't crawl frames or iframes.

[Dayo_UK]

Googlebot will treat the iframe src as a seperate page.

I tend to disallow Robots from pages that I only display in Iframes so that it does not go in the index - however as you have stated you really want the Adsense code in the page with the content so you dont want to disallow robots - I would imagine that this will lead to these pages appearing in the index out of place from the page where it belongs. :(

I therefore think you may need a bit of script for visitors who land on the iframe src page to be redirected to the correct page (someone did post this script on ww not long back but I cant find it at the moment :( )

[Sharper]

Thanks for the feedback.

It sounds like in order to get the pages properly indexed as one whole page I'm going to have to write something server-side to grab what would have been the iframe content via an HTTP GET and include it inline with the header and footer content. It'll lead to more processing and a slower page returning to the browser for the exact same content, but at least people will be able to find the pages via Google.

I was hoping someone would say "Oh yeah, Google treats Iframes differently than they do regular frames!", but alas, 'tis not to be so.