To frame or unframe....

that is the question

[austtr]

A site that's been around since 1997 has approx 200 big content pages and was designed using frames for reasons of best navigation for the visitor.

It makes effective use of the no-frames tag and consistently ranks top 3-5 for its primary keywords (1.43million results in Google), so use of frames has never upset its ranking performance across all the se's. It is very strong on content, has a consistent theme and lots of incoming links from quality sites.

For commercial resons it's now time to put the old trooper out to pasture and launch a shiny new replacement and I'm faced with a decision. Do I follow the conventional wisdom that says "do away with the frames" or do I follow the path of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and stay with the frames.

I don't need to chase better rankings, but nor do I want to lose the results of previous efforts. I'm worried that by removing the frames I lose the opportunity to put out good, tasty spider food in the noframes tag. I'm not sure just how big an impact that would have.

Anyone have feedback on this ... are there other issues I'm not seeing?

<typo correction>

[4eyes]

Personally, I'd de-frame it.

Having said that, the last couple of updates have brought a couple of my old <noframes> sites back into the running - so as a technique, it appears to be still working OK

However, frames & noframes optimisations still make me twitchy - never know when they are going to be dumped on and if.when it happens its a major rebuild - bleargh!

[edit_g]

We deframed a pr 5 site around 8 months ago. When we put it live google loved it so much that it indexed pages which it had always been there but it had never before seen. It really gobbled it up. We are now up to PR6 and doing much better in Google than we were before. The content has really not changed that much- it was the de-framing that did it.

(keep in mind that you're not allowed to come looking for me if this is not the case for your site ;))

[kcartlidge]

Same here - framing doesn't necessarily 'confuse' SE's, but some info does seem to get 'missed'.

[tedster]

The last site I deframed (taking great care to preserve URLs) had been doing well enough on the search engines. But after de-framing it did better, as others report here.

However, the biggest bonus came from the human users. One stat I follow is page views per unique IP - a decent measure of stickiness. That stat nearly DOUBLED. Considering that the old frameset added 3 page views just by loading, that was a remarkable leap.

My operating theory (based on physically observing different people surf) is that only a certain percentage of users really "get" frame navigation. Those who do get it appreciate the ease of always having the menu on screen. But the rest find framed pages hard to relate to.

Whatever the reason, visitors started exploring more, and sales went up. By the way, we didn't change content at all - just flattened the pages.

[dhdweb]

While frames do make it easy to have a great navigation layout, there are a lot of problems as-well! For a framed site to look good takes a lot of planning.

I have given up the ghost on frames and also find better SE indexing as a result.

Personaly I hate it when a site has more than one scroll bar or when content gets cut off because the site designer thinks my resolution should be higher than 800x600.

[NFFC]

>(taking great care to preserve URLs)

Looks like the killer combo austtr, tedster [as per] nailed it right there!

[austtr]

Thanks to all for your contributions.

Tedster..

The plan is most definitely to retain exactly the same folder structure and file names so the URL's will remain the same.

[digitalghost]

Been doing quite a bit of this "deframing' lately and it seems to help. After we get done deframing it, we fix the code so that it validates. Nothing but good news to report there.