"Linking" to other sites with <frame src=""> instead of anchor tags

[alphacooler]

I have a digg style blog section that has snippets from popular blogs (with permission). If a user clicks on a post title I pull up a page with a thin header at the top (frame 1) and the other site in frame 2 at the bottom.

How does this play in regards to duplicate content? And does this count as me linking to these sites in the eyes of the aglo?

Why am I not directly linking you ask? Well i'm an authority in the space and serve up 100 blog feeds. ALL of these blogs are PR5 and have linked to me naturally (as I am the noted authority). I don't want to link back b/c this would turn all my beautiful links into recips.

Outside of frames, I guess the only other thing I could do is wall this section off with a login prompt. And yes I know about robots.txt and rel="nofollow" but who's kidding who. These aren't reliable.

So what is the best option?

[tedster]

If the other site in the second frame is being served from their domain, then you are linking to them. The content within the frame is NOT on your site and it cannot be a duplicate issue.

Search engines index and rank html documents by url, and not "everything that's showing up in a window".

<added>
I just re-read your post and I need to revise my first comment. I now understand that the frameset is not generated until someone clicks on the link, so the other site is only showing up as a src attribute in the frame element. So no, that is not exactly a link. However, my comments about duplicate content still pertain -- this is not a threat for a duplicate content problem.
</added>

[alphacooler]

Tedster,

Thanks for the reply. Just so I am clear, the frame page has 2 frames (top frame is my header on my site). The bottom frame has a src url of the blog.

I was told that this setup would be tantamount to linking directly to the site in the bottom frame in the eyes of Google and the rest of the engines.

From your post I gather that there is a situation in which a framed page is counted as a link. Under what situation does this occur? You mentioned something about the dynamic nature of the 2nd frame making a difference? I don't see how this could possibly matter.

Thanks so very much.

[tedster]

I gather that there is a situation in which a framed page is counted as a link. Under what situation does this occur?

Taking your case as an example, when the top frame also has a link (anchor tag) that uses a target attribute to change the bottom frame. That's essentially what I was getting at.

tantamount to linking directly to the site in the bottom frame

Common sense might seem to indicate this, but in practice:

1. The Page Rank paper and patent do not mention src attributes

2. In 2005 I did some testing of iframes (but not framesets) and again, if there was only a src attribute I did not see the kind of influence that you would expect a link to have. At best, it got the url of the iframecrawled, but that's all.

3. I never see src attribute urls listed in backlinks. Has anyone ever seen this?

[g1smd]

I don't like frames at all.

They cause too much complexity in indexing pages, and getting bots to spider the site.

.

"PHP includes" are the way to go... similar functionality for the user, same ease of update for the webmater, but the pages are now built on the server before being sent out, instead of the browser assembling the page from several little chunks independently received.

[tedster]

But there is one significant difference. If you use a frame, then the content of that frame is not part of the url itself. If that content is assembled by the server via an include, then all that content is indexed and ranked as the one url that it is.

I rarely use frames, and certainly not for an entire site template. But in some situations, they do have their uses.

[g1smd]

I'd see that as a job for an iframe these days... but personally have never needed to do that.

It would fit what the OP wanted to do, anyway.

[alphacooler]

What would the iFrame accomplish that the normal frame wouldn't?

Also I spent the day doing some research and I have not found any sites getting backlink credit for their pages showing up in a framed site.

[tedster]

Whether an iframe or a frameset, the indexing situation is the same -- except that with an iframe you don't need a dedicated frameset url, and that just "might" make some difference somehow or other. I haven't seen one, though.

[CainIV]

How does this play in regards to duplicate content?

It could, under some conditions be indexed as the site content you are 'borrowing'

And does this count as me linking to these sites in the eyes of the aglo?

From what I have seen, most links that come to me from framed sites have not been counted in Google, although this is tough to give definites for

Why am I not directly linking you ask? Well i'm an authority in the space and serve up 100 blog feeds.

Authority sites do link out to other websites in their field who offer outstanding information.

The information you are framing is good enough for your visitors, but not enough to give them a 'real' link?

[tedster]

It could, under some conditions be indexed as the site content you are 'borrowing'

I haven't seen that for several years, and even when it did happen, it was definitely a bug. I saw it more often on Yahoo than on Google.

[g1smd]

Unframing your own content allows the bots to better index your own content and follow internal links.

Iframing the other site keeps Google from indexing the other site as if it were a part of your own.

[kaled]

Use a robots noindex,nofollow meta in the frameset.

Kaled.