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I'm learning as I go along here - I guess like most of us - but am afraid I may have made a terrible mistake. I operate an affiliate site that sells, to use a bad example, apples. I have tons of original, well laid-out pages on the topic. I sell apples in/from each of 50 states so that there is a California apple info page, an Iowa apple info page, etc. From each of these fifty info pages is a link that says "Buy Iowa apples here" or whatever. This link leads to a frame page which at the bottom states that your order will now be handled by Apple Supplier to the Affiliates Inc. The main frame above that automatically fills with the order page located on the other company's site. Then, once you fill out the form and click, you are in the other company's order process and no longer on our server.
Is this bad? I mean, is this a classic mistake? Is this exactly what Google is trying to guard against? It looks (and feels) good and it's very smooth and quite functional for me, my customers, and the supplier. But I ran across a few posts that suggest that an automatic Java redirect is one of the worst things you can do!! Does that mean only involving the home page or in a situation like this, too? If I've made a mistake, what are my options? Should I make people click to load the company's form? Is it useful to have a robot.txt file deny a spider access to these pages? I'm afraid Google's already spidered all these pages already! Please help. Thank you!
Mark Candiotti
Welcome to wmw
I wouldn't worry to much about the redirect. As I understand you have to redirect at some time and as long as you're not using the redirect to hide or cloak content there shouldn't be any problems. If Google already has crawled the page and index it I wouldn't worry.
Javascript redirects and other redirects are mainly a problem if you are trying to hide optimised content for Google.
Thank you for your (positive) answer. No, the pages are not an optimization trick - just wasn't sure if Google's spider would realize that. Everything's squeaky clean. :-) I'm pretty sure they've been crawled (there's about fifty pages that do this - for each area) but am waiting to see about the pages being indexed. Thank you, again.
Mark
Well, after spending countless hours reading everything on this subject back a year or so, I'm afraid my technical naivete is hurting my understanding. So let me try it like this. My page for ordering apples, for example, reads like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Mama’s Apples Order Page</title>
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
function MM_openBrWindow(theURL,winName,features) { //v2.0
window.open(theURL,winName,features);
}
//-->
</script>
</head>
<frameset rows="90,*" frameborder="YES" border="1" framespacing="1" cols="980*">
<frame name="Frame1" scrolling="NO" noresize src="apples.html" >
<frame name="FrameMain" src="apples-order.html">
</frameset>
<noframes>
<body bgcolor="#cccccc" text="#000000">
<br>
onLoad="MM_openBrWindow('http://www.mamas-apples-affiliate-supplier.com/x/supplier/t.asp?id=blahblahblah)"
</body>
</noframes>
</html>
NOTE: INSIDE the FrameMain, a URL opens automatically to the off-site order page at Mama’s Apples Affiliate Supplier.
First of all, is there anything bad/dangerous to me here? The system is better to me than having the client click a text link (one more click) to get to the order form.
Secondly, is there anything "bad" in the NOFRAMES area. I've been reading a lot that appears as though this area is ripe for abuse. Though I'm not abusing this area, I don't want to get thrown out with the bath water.
Finally, will googlebot (and PageRank) follow the link in the NOFRAMES tag to the affiliate supplier? Preferable to keep the PR on site, of course, as there are as many pages like this as there are brands of apples, which are many. This drain could turn me into a PR vegetable!
Any thoughts?
Thanks from a tech-newbie, the most dangerous kind. :-)
The redirect will not get you banned. Just make sure that you also provide a normal link for the browsers that doesn't support javascript.
What you have been reading about JS redericts is probably different ways to hide/cloak content for the search engines but that is not what you are doing so don't worry.
Google most likely wont follow the link in noframes. First of all it's inside a JS. Secondly the URL contains a ?, which may be a problem. Use normal static links if you want to pass on some link pop: <a href="http://www.mamas-apples-affiliate-supplier.com">link</a>
<frame name="FrameMain" src="apples-order.html">
and then redirect that to the target page. Wouldn't it be much simpler to just directly use the link here that you want to show to the visitor?
I also don't think that either approach will bring you any trouble (if anything at all, then it would hurt the merchants site), I just don't know why you're taking the long way home here.
By the way, would a link that I have in Frame1 back to my homepage be read/recorded at all by the "Spiders That Be" - or do they only read the frameset???
