Frames and No frames in google

do they help?

[bubbleman]

Does frames or noframe tags help in google ranking?
thanks

[rcjordan]

Welcome, bubbleman.

The short answer is "yes, if you *HAVE* to use framesets." All in all, I'd rather have a flat page to work with.

[Terry_Plank]

Basically, it is best to stay from frames unless you absolutely have to use them. You will get more mileage our of standard HTML structure because you can more easily emphasize a large numbe of keyphrases!

[jimbeetle]

Hi bubbleman,

If you absolutely must use frames be sure to put good content in the <noframes> tag. Include links to the home page and other important pages on your site, as appropriate.

An absolute must is a site map linked at least from the home page. This just ensures that the spider has a roadmap to find all of your pages.

We finally finished a year-long changeover from frames because there are a lot of site management problems. What happens if somebody clicks on a SERP link to one of your pages and it comes up "naked" without the supporting navigation in the other pages of the frameset? Similarly, wht happens when Jeeves or some other site frames one of these naked pages?

Be sure to take a look around all of the usual script library sites for javascripts dealing with frames. There are quite a few that can make your life easier.

Jim

[tedster]

While you're looking for scripts to put those orphaned pages back into their parent frameset, check out our own on the Generic Javascript [webmasterworld.com] thread at message #21.

I couldn't agree more about the challenges of framed websites. But Google does a good job today of indexing your actual content pages -- and from what I can tell, they rely a lot less on <noframes> content. I've got one client with thousands of framed pages and not a <noframes> tag in sight. They do quite well, but they do take care of the orphaned page situation with a server side script.

On the plus side for frames, when your content pages are not carrying the overhead of full navigation and graphics, they can be very lean and mean - small file size with good, concentrated and optimized copy. It can be rather easy to earn a high ranking for them with just a little attention.

However, I also feel the downside far outweighs the possible benefit.

[jimbeetle]

tedster,

Yup, when our pages were lean and mean without the overhead they did very well across all SEs. I am now -- at this very moment -- changing our navigation and other parts of our "wrapper" to external js files. Am going to do this one component at a time just to make it easy on me, but also to try see when I happen to hit the right balance.

Jim

[Digimon]

If you have to use a frameset and can't avoid it there is a way to get good rankings and avoid "orfan" results...
Use a js in your head to set up the different frames and then put your content into the body tag without the noframes tag, just in the body.
It has been really helpfull to me several times.

[Bobby]

Digimon, could you give us an example of a .js in the head setting up frames, how is it done?

[bluemi]

I'm using this for the frames which are not supposed to show up "orphaned", and it works well for my site:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
if (window == top) top.location.href = "index.html";
// End -->
</script>

[tedster]

The javascript I linked to up above is a bit more complex than bluemi's. But instead of redirecting every orphaned page to the same "index configuration" of the frameset, it loads the specific content page that the referal asked for, but with the frameset around it.

That can be a big help with traffic that comes from search engines.

[dmjw01]

I've been struggling to persuade Google to index my content pages for the last few months. My frameset page has been in Google for some time, but Googlebot never follows the links in my 'noframes' section, and I don't believe it has indexed any of the text either. I've read elsewhere on this forum that if your PR is below a certain minimum (mine's only 3) then Google will largely ignore your 'noframes' content - and my experience agrees with this assertion.

This leads to a chicken-and-egg situation. If Google ignores all the juicy keywords in your 'noframes' section, and won't use the links to spider the content on the rest of your site, then your PR is doomed to stay low. And with a low PR, Google will continue to ignore your 'noframes' content.

[Macguru]

I have several framesets with NOFRAMES content in the index. They can be found in SERPs for relevant queries. The cached version show all source code, text and links. I think this search engine does index the NOFRAMES tag, but gives it less weight than regular pages.

[Bodaby]

I absolutely must use frames. I'd like to use the js-trick tedster mentions above but won't Google hate/ban me if I redirect on all my pages.

Is it safe to use or is there a more safe way?

[robertito62]

one of our sites gets hit by 1 million uniques a day. Over 2000 partners refer traffic to it.

The site is framed and only has PR4, most of which hardly passes to its inner pages.

Frames are very tricky, in my view. It took us months to be able to change the snippets read by Google the way we wanted. I now think all the time spent on overcoming frame/SE limitations could have been more useful building SE friendly pages. I am of the idea that good navigation does not equate to framing necessarily.

For us itīs probably too late to change. Another thing to take into account if you ever change your mind about frames.

[rcjordan]

>Is it safe to use

A javascript redirect isn't read by the spider. It's safe.

[dmjw01]

Macguru said: "I have several framesets with NOFRAMES content in the index. They can be found in SERPs for relevant queries."

That may be true, but I bet the PR of those sites is higher than 3. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a difference between Google caching your content and actually indexing the content. Google cached my frameset page a long time ago, but if I copy-n-paste a whole sentence from the 'noframes' content into the Google toolbar, it doesn't find my site at all.

This indicates to me that Google has cached the content, but hasn't indexed it - and I believe this may be because I have a low PR?

[Macguru]

You are correct about PR of such framesets, they are above PR 3.

I am pretty sure that Google does index the NOFRAMES tag because those pages show up normally in SERPs when I query for a snippet of text in it.

<added>And those pages are years old, I dont have any experience with new frameset pages.</added>

[Flippi]

I've got a lot of index pages which holds the framesets. All of this pages have a NOFRAMES part with inbound links to single pages inside the frameset. Google has properly indexed the NOFRAMES part and also PR is around 5 or 6.

So don't worry about frameset pages that are correctly installed cause Google takes them in the index and gives them a normal PR.

[DavidT]

I'm using a single frameset for the whole site as per normal. On Googlebot's first visit he went very deep, took about half of 500 pages. On the second visit looked like he took every page although I wasn't counting. The site very quickly started getting referrals from Google (for pretty obscure terms I'll admit) even though with pagerank 0 and totally orphaned link-wise, none in or out. The referrals were going to second level product pages which the frameset allows me to keep _very_ lean and mean as tedster mentioned before. The index page does appear in some search results often on the same page as the product page, I totally keyword-stuffed the no-frames section, I can't believe they still allow it.

I still worry though if I could be doing better without the frameset.

For java-script I use Frame Jammer v.3.2 from Hal Pawluk which seems to work well although it does show a flash of the default page for the relevant frame where the jammed page is to be opened in.
It's only about 8 lines of code.
Can't think of anything else