Iframed Domains - How does Google treat them?

[traffik daddy]

Hi, I'm wondering the consequences of performing SEO to an iframed domain.

We have had a proposal from a design company who want to outsource their SEO to another company, but I bought up a few concerns with my boss.

Their system is a weird setup, not in a bad way from a design point of view, it gives them good control, but for SEO it could cause a problem.

Basically they build all of their clients sites from one big CMS based on one domain and iframe their clients branded domain to the index page in another location, so basically their clients have just one page cached in Google and the rest of the content on is on another url. They seem to do this with all of their clients and all of their clients content in on one domain.

I was wondering how Google treats iframed domains and SEO? They are pointing to unique content on another domain and it is not something I have performed in the past and I am sceptical to start work on the domain in case something bad happens (panda, etc) as surely it would be treated as a one page website, i.e:- a thin website?

Thank you
TD

[tedster]

Is this the same situation you described in your other thread? [webmasterworld.com...]

[dstiles]

I haven't seen that idea used for several years; it used to be used a lot for el-cheapo domain registrations.

But...

I have one web site remaining that really uses iFrames and there is no problem with it. The only proviso is: if it's an ecommerce site and you list it in Base (ex-froogle) then a click on any product MUST show all relevant frames of the site. Tricky but possible.

The only other problem with iFrames is if the visitor has them turned off in the browser or firewall (eg Firefox + NoScript). In that case they may get strange results from the site. As might a few mobile devices.

[tedster]

Here's the issue I think. Whatever URL is in the iframe - does it also resolve directly? If so, then Google would be able index it that way.

[traffik daddy]

Hi Tedster, it is similar, sorry I should have posted this there, but it is a different situation entirely for us.

The web design company that has approached us uses a mass CMS system where all of their clients content is built on one domain (where the CMS is installed) and they use framed domain forwarding if their client requests a domain. Its like having 100 sites on one Wordpress installation, creating 100 pages, buying 100 domains, and forwarding the domains to each created page. Its a strange setup but it seems to work okay for them from a design point of view.

They asked us to perform SEO on the forwarded framed domains.

Thank you
TD

[tedster]

You said you're skeptical about working on the SEO for this set-up. I think you are wise - it sounds like a disaster to me.