Would IFRAME links help or hurt for SEO & gaining more backlinks?

Giving away a service anyway, but would it help me?

[toomer]

I have a community site that has a number of news headlines about specific technology areas. I've felt kind of odd about mailing people I don't even know and asking them for links ... and while our traffic is still lingering in the hundreds of visitors per day, growing them naturally is going to take a while.

One thing I was planning to do already ... was to make a small IFRAME version of our 5 most recent headlines (or most popular) and put that code on a page where people could freely drop it on their website if their site is related to ours. Then there would be a "For more headlines..." link at the bottom, which would point to the root of our domain.

I plan to do this anyway, but it's a ways down my list of things to do. However, I was thinking that if a lot of sites have IFRAME links on their sites, pointing to a URL within ours -- wouldn't that help out our page rank and then hopefully give us a little boost in the SERPS? If so, I may decide to move this development item up a bit on my task list ....

Thanks in advance!

[tedster]

If there really is a true link -- that is, an anchor element such as <a href="your-url-here" target="iframename"> -- then yes, it helps.

However, in the scenario you describe, you are much more likely to be getting an attribute such as src="your-url-here" -- and that is not a link. It's been a while since I tested this, but it wasn't counted historically, and I would be surprised if it is counted as a true link today.

The iframe src attribute does help you get the iframed page crawled, if that is an issue for you. But it's just not a link and I have doubts that it will affect PR and so on. For starters, there is no "link text", not even a linked img element with an alt attribute.

If you're "going to do this anyway", as you said, then please do report back. I would be pleased to know that it helped you.

[toomer]

Ah, I see your point tedster. I guess I could politely "request" that they put a direct link in, right above the IFRAME that I will provide them (at my own bandwidth cost) as a gesture in good faith.

But based on how you've described it, I think this one is going to linger around towards the bottom of my to-do list for a bit longer.

[panos]

What about this:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.yoursite.com/iframe/><a href="http://www.yoursite.com/"> Kw1 kw2</a></script>

Isn't that a true link?

[ning]

Why you don't make a RSS feed that your users can use on their pages?