Proper method to un-frame my website?

I am seriously considering un-framing my website.

[reweb]

Hello- I am seriously considering un-framing my website. It is a two year old site that ranks fairly well. I have a Google page rank of PR4. I don’t want to mess anything up and loss my decent rankings. Although I think at this point I could do better if I un-frame. I built the site myself so I can do the html work.

Is there a step by step guide anywhere? Is there a good source for left hand navigation? Some type of search engine friendly table?

Any help really appreciated!

[treeline]

A few weeks ago I un-framed a site for a friend that had been in frames for many years. They're a fairly important manufacturer in their industry, but I'd been nudging for a while that there would be benefits to giving up frames. Especially being able to bookmark individual pages, and other sites being able to link directly to inner pages.

Basically we kept the left-hand navigation text links where they'd been in the frame, but now flat on the page. Since they'd scroll out of sight on longer pages, we repeated them horizontally at the bottom of every page. This created an L shaped navigation system. We also re-titled each page to be appropriate to specific page content.

The frames were replaced using a basic template in Dreamweaver, which allowed easy updating of many pages through many drafts.

The results have been great. Search engine traffic has jumped dramatically, primarily to inner pages for dozens of new search word combinations we weren't getting before. For the key phrases that the site hadn't held top rankings for, it moved way up on the first page. Google and MSN Beta particularly liked the changes, Yahoo was less impressed.

I'd encourage dropping the frames. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.

[le_gber]

reweb,

what I would do in your situation is go in Google and Yahoo do a search for site:http://www.yourdomain.com and check out which pages of your site they've got in their database.

take a pen and paper, write the page names down and then check with the old site (framed one) the pages that are missing (if any). Check if the navigation frame(s) is/are listed also etc...

then create your new pages with the navigation 'flat' on the page, keep the page name the same, and if some pages that used to be (I think of the framed nav) no longer are, use a 301 permanent redirect to move visitors and bots to the site homepage or the most appropriate page (site map?).

hope this helps.

Leo

[reweb]

Thanks for the help!