Frameset and PR Leak?

Is my site leaking?

[seoogle]

Hi everyone!

I maintain a website that uses frames…. I know, I know,… but they won’t let me loose the frames. Here is the situation:

The domain shows a PR of 5.
The actual frameset page has no PR.
The home page that loads into the main frame has a PR of 5.
The page that loads into the menu frame also has a pr of 5.

I am assuming that the PR is being split amongst the 2 pages that load into the frameset, but I would prefer that it only be distributed to the page that loads into the main frame. I don’t want any PR moved to the menu frame because it contains links to pages that I don’t really need to rank. All important links are contained on the page that loads into the main frame.

I hope that is clear… Now the question:

Can I use javascript or some other means to plug the PR leak to the menu frame while retaining the PR for the main frame. If so, wouldn’t this help to raise the PR for the home page that loads into the main frame?

Thanks!

[Gorilla]

A clean way to plug the leak is by declaring in your robots.txt file that the URL going into the menu frame should not be indexed.

Doing this would raise the PR somewhat, the amount depends on your link structure. I would be surprised if the increased PR results in a measurable difference when it comes to ranking.

[seoogle]

Hmmm.... How would I do that?

[Gorilla]

Create a document on your webserver so that it is returned whenever someone reads this URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

In the robots.txt file you list URLs that spiders should not read. In your case, the file should contain something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /Url-going-into-menu-frame

This will say to all spiders that they should not index the content of the menu-frame.

You can read more about the robots.txt file on the Web Robots Pages [robotstxt.org].

[seoogle]

Based on other posts that I have read here my concern is that doing so may remove the menu from the index, but the pr will still be drained from the home page as it does have a link to the menu page.

Just for clarity I will expand on my previous question...

The pages:
default.html - the frameset page PR=0
indexmain.html - The home page that loads in the main frame. PR=5
menu.html - the menu page that loads in the menu frame. PR=5

Here is the frameset part of default.html
---
<frameset cols="134,*" frameborder="NO" border="0" framespacing="0">
<frame name="menu" scrolling="NO" noresize src="menu.html">
<frame name="main" noresize src="indexmain.html">
</frameset>
---

How does Google handle this? 99% of our 100+ incoming links are to our home page. Since default.html has 0 PR and the pages that it loads each have PR 5 is it safe to assume that the PR for what would be our home page is being split between indexmain.html and menu.html? If so, is there a way that I can stop the PR from being split and have it only go to the indexmain.html page using JavaScript or some other means? It does not seem like robots.txt is the way to go here... or is it? My main concern would be that I don't want to exclude menu.html and have the PR for our home page just drain off to nowhere...

Anyone have any thoughts on this? GoogleGuy? Do I have it all wrong or am I missing something here? I would love to loose the frames for MANY reasons, but the client won't budge....<sigh>