Tag Archives: frames

SEO Tips for Frame Based Websites


Unless you actually know what you are doing and why you are doing it, I kindly suggest you don’t Use Frames to Design Your Website.

If possible avoid using Frames. Some people have difficulty navigating within frames, either because the frames are confusing or because the software they are using simply cannot read frames.

Anyway following are the SEO Tips whom are in impulse to create frame based websites

1. Search engines having augmented problems with spidering a “frames based” website. I accept as true that there will be continuous problems and I advise a redesign to a non-frames environment. Note down that the URL included in the frames pages are being indexed instead of your appealing frames page, so if you include content from a different site in your frames page you are not receiving any credit for that content. You are simply affecting the other site to get spidered. It does not help you in the least in this case. If the content is from your own site and you need to use frames then there is an SEO tip that will help by reset up the frames environment for the website.

As a provisional, adding this to the top of each page included in a frame will result in having that page identify that it is being loaded outside of the frame and it will reset up the frame around this page:

<SCRIPT>
<!– Hide script from older browsers
function changePage() {
if (self.parent.frames.length == 0) self.parent.location=”http://yourdomain/index.html”;
}
changePage();
// end hiding contents –>
</SCRIPT>

2. Since search engines hold up much of their ranking algorithms on link popularity measures (like Google’s Page Rank), a website’s main page is usually the strongest. But on many framed websites, the main page consists solely of the <frameset> layout and the ubiquitous “Your browser doesn’t support frames.” message in the <noframes> section. This is an enormous mistake when it comes to search engine ranking because such <frameset> pages have no relevant text content for the search engines to use for ranking purposes.

Your <noframes> section should include a scaled-down version of the main or default document’s content so that search engines will have more text to index than simply the page title. Use an <h1> tag to display an appropriate headline, along with a paragraph of two of keyword-rich text – what I call a mission statement – to give your frame-based website’s strongest page a fighting chance to compete with conventional designs. You should also include regular HTML links to the most important pages in the website. If you make your <noframes> section like a normal webpage, it can rank as high as any normal webpage.

3. When using frames, always offer meaningful NOFRAMES content for those people who cannot read framed information. Use NOFRAMES properly – “upgrade your browser” is of no help to someone using (through choice or necessity) the most up-to-date version of a browser that simply doesn’t handle frames. The NOFRAMES section should contain meaningful content with links to the other pages in your site, so that they can be accessed without frames.

SEO Drawbacks of Frame based Websites


As a SEO expert, I frequently give advice to my clients to avoid using Frames based web design. There is no doubt that Frames make for bad SEO by causing website accessibility and usability problems. Even a well optimized web site design will struggle to achieve a high search engine ranking, compared to a non Frames web site design, even with proper use of the <NOFRAMES> tag for alternative content. For this reason when visitors reach the content Frame from organic search results they are left without any website navigation as the Frameset is not constructed properly. This is a website accessibility disaster and Frames prove little better for SEO either.

Frames can also cause search engines major troubles. For instance, a search engine may only deliver the content frame when accessed through deep links in the SERPs – thus rendering your well thought out navigation to other pages redundant.

Even though many search engine spiders today are able to read the content inside frames, the perspective of an SEO is that it is still a very bad idea for a couple of reasons. Frames are pages that consist of individual html pages that are put together in such a way that it appear to be one page.  Frames were used by web designers to maintain a consistent and standard look among all the other pages on the website and for the purpose of navigation.  The confusion for the search engines occur because they don’t reconcile the content in the frame with the page that the frame sits on – while the viewer may see the information as being together, the search engines may view it as a completely separate page.

One more reason it is a very bad idea to use frames is that some of the older browsers find it difficult or just plain impossible to read.  Don’t take the chance of alienating visitors who don’t happen to have the latest software/hardware combinations.

Google Information about Frame based Websites in Google Webmaster Help Center

Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don’t correspond to the conceptual model of the web. In this model, one page displays only one URL. Pages that use frames or iframes display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we don’t guarantee that we will.

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34445&topic=8522