Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Iframe in seo and indexing issues

Hi,

This information is for ones who use iframes or frames in your websites.
There is always a debate whether google indexes the page in iframes or a frame. Well.. I would say yes..

Still some may say that you need to still navigate to the iframe page using some links. Again I say that its not required.. Confused???

Its true and I personally experienced in the websites I was handling in my company. We had used iframes to show some affiliate marketing feeds. These iframe contents were served from a different server. One fine morning we found the index of these pages in google.

Again another question is does iframe pass PR? Yes is the answer, but it will be a diferent PR from the page it is embedded into. If a parent page is having 6 PR, you cannot take the iframe to pass the same 6 PR from a link on it. If you want to know how much is the PR of the included page, you need to open the iframe conent page in a browser and see the PR.

If somebody links to your site from a framed page and claims that the page is having 8 PR, you should not agree with him unless you find 8 PR for the iframe content page.

Any debates on this iframe and seo issue is greatly invited and you can post your views at SEO Forums

2 comments:

Richard Scott said...

we are currently developing a site to host an affiliate network, well I was wondering that if I used iframes, and from this page contains a lot of outbound links, does this negate the value of my main site or domain? I am trying to lessen the number of outbound links from our site.

seolion said...

If you put links in iframe, google cannot treat it as the links from the mainpage.

What I would suggest in addition to what you do is ..

create all the iframe pages under one folder named /iframes or something like that.. And in robots.txt disallow that folder from crawling. Now your main pages only will be indexed which will not have any outbound links as they are in iframes. Your iframe pages will not be indexed as you have disallowed them.

Does that sound good?