Using Frames
Although frames are not as common in web design as they used
to be, there are still some site owners and designers that
wish to make use of this technology. It is important to understand
that because framed sites place content within frame sets,
rather than directly in the code of the page, search engine
spiders have a much more difficult time reading and indexing
the content of a framed web site.
Although the major search engines, including Alta Vista and
Google have recently started to index content contained within
framesets, many spiders are still unable to follow links in
this type of code. Until frames fall out of favor as a design
tool, or more search engines learn to index them, webmasters
that wish to use this technology will have to make use of
some special techniques to make their sites more spider friendly.
Let's start by taking a look at the average code for a page
using frames.
< frameset rows="*" >
< frame name="main" src="http://www.yoursite.com/"
>
< noframes >
< body >
< p >This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't
support them.< /p >
< /body >
< /noframes >
< /frameset >
For the spiders that are able to read the content within
< frame > tags, the information on your page will be
indexed and judged as any other page would. The main problem
with this is that the listing in the search engine results
will be to the specific HTML page in the frame that was indexed,
not to the web page that has the frame as part of it. If your
page copy is in one frame and your navigation is in another,
the search results could show ONLY the frame that has your
navigation, or ONLY the page that has your page copy.
For spiders that are unable to index the content within a
< frame > tag, the only content they would be able to
read is the information within the < noframes > tag.
If you have not placed any text in the < noframes >
tag, the spider will have no text to index and no way to rank
the web site.
For this reason, it is essential that any site making use
of frames add alternative content to the site. The body copy
within the < noframes > tag above should be replaced
with a few paragraphs of keyword rich text, as well as links
to other non-framed pages that contain additional keyword
rich content.
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