Will Google crawl and index content from an iframe?

[xbase234]

I'm using an iframe to add a basic top navigation through a large number of HTML pages. Does anyone have any knowledge of Google's current behavior towards iframes, or in other words, will Google index and count links served from a .txt or .html file served through the frame?

thanks in advance

[irishaff]

No, i would suggest using an include if possible. The frame will possibly be indexed but as a seperate page.

[xbase234]

that's an issue I'm running into - what other types of includes would you recommend for HTML pages?

[lizardx]

this is an issue that recently came up for one of our sites. From what I can see, Google does not follow src links in iframes and frames, but Yahoo and MSN do, without any question.

Using an iframe for navigation is a bad idea, it also drops page performance significantly. Use includes.

[MHes]

>Google does not follow src links in iframes and frames

Yes it does, it just indexes the source page seperately.

[xbase234]

it's not necessarily a bad idea, given the pages I have to work with, and the purpose for doing so. But I would like the site to pass link popularity between internal pages.

[lizardx]

"it just indexes the source page seperately"

All iframe or frame content would get indexed separately since it's a separate page, of course.

Last I checked however, which was 1 or 2 weeks ago, Google was not indexing iframes or frames by following the src tag, of course if you include noframe type navigation, they all follow that fine, this could have changed since last week however. At that point, when I checked this, Google was not following our src links, Yahoo and MSN beta were. Your results may vary.

[ciml]

Google started following IFRAME src two or three months ago.

At present, Google follows the src link and indexes the alternate content.

[xbase234]

Ciml -

to clarify, are you seeing Google index separately, or as part of the same page?

[jetboy_70]

Google lists iframe content files as separate files. As such, Google treats iframes as it treats any other frames.

[ciml]

Yep separately, a frame or iframe src is like a normal link (but without anchor text).