Google and IFrames

Will this irritate the Google God ?

[gopi]

I have a well ranked site with good quality content in a very very competitive field. But our conversion seems to be poor.

To increase our sales i am planning to use a 3 paragraph marketing pitch with a buy now link inside a inline frame (Iframe) across all our well ranked pages .

So when a user views the page the marketing pitch will appear in the beginning of the page followed by content . I am using Iframe mainly because its easy to update across hundreds of page and more importantly this will not affect my present page in terms of Keyword optimisation.

I am not sure what google thinks about this .I believe there should not be any problems and this cannot be considered cloaking because the user is still seeing what googlebot saw plus the marketing pitch.

Please advise , thanks ...

[highman]

or big .gif?

[gopi]

highman , I dont understand what you are saying . I guess you meant to include a big gif image in all the pages.

I considered it first then i dropped the idea because an image will be a big bandwidth dragger and will be slow to load which will sure irritate my visitors.

[highman]

yes thats what I meant, a white gif with text on can be made quite small, file size wise.

[MHes]

Hi
We use iframes.....no problem. High rankings in the UK jobs market.

[gopi]

MHes , Thanks for the response. Can you please tell me the size of the IFrame you use.

[MHes]

Hi
width="135" height="500"

I will sticky mail the url to you.

[gopi]

MHes , Thanks for the info. I really appreciate your gesture...

I am planning to use a much larger IFrame. , width=100% , height=900.
There will be no images inside the iframe ,just good ol' plain text.

[tedster]

I don't think you have anything to worry about from the automatic algo - but a hand check (triggered by a complaint from a competitor, perhaps?) might bring some difficulties.

After all, what you are proposing will end up as a kind of poor man's cloak, and the average surfer will start out seeing several screens of something very different than the Google SERP indicated.

If the domain is important to you, I'd suggest some caution here. You might do much better not to make the iframe the full page width, but rather use it as a sidebar -- so the indexed content is also immediately visible when a visitor clicks through from Google.

[MHes]

tedster

I agree, we use a small iframe for nav purposes, but it is tucked away on the righthand side of the page.

[shelleycat]

Big gif's may not be huge in filesize but they are very inaccessable. I've been forced to surf without pictures a number of times this year because of ISP problems and any information in graphics was lost to me. Then there are all the other accessability problems, people with text readers, people with poor eyesight wanting to increase font sizes, etc. From a users point of view I would not suggest it.

I am interested in the rest of the comments here about iframes though as I'm considering using them in the near future. :)

Shelley

[gopi]

tedster , i am bit confused . I dont see how this can be considered cloaking. Users are still gonna see the same content Googlebot indexed.

The only additional thing is they are gonna see extra promotional content in the iframe.

Brett , i saw your post regarding using iframe to insert text [webmasterworld.com...] , so whats your experience with it

[Brett_Tabke]

>experience with it

Where I've used an iframe, it has been perfect. Some times we go ahead and block the indexing on the iframe content too.

I've never done anything like you are proposing there Gopi. That's a big chunk of screen real estate. I can certainly understand it's appeal to reduce site updating.

The only thing to be aware of, is that sooner or later the iframe content page (target url) will get indexed by Google. It will leak from a referral, scanned for the http address in the iframe declaration, or via someones toolbar. Either way, Google does find all those pages that are pointed too by an iframe - it's only a matter of time.

Also, tedster's trick of using an ILAYER does work like a charm for backwards compatability.