HTML Frames and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

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Author: Traian

Frame tags, FRAMESET, FRAME, NOFRAMES and IFRAMEs are used to present web documents in other web documents, a web page embedded into another web page if you will.

The most common question amongst other SEO practitioners is Are Frames Bad for SEO? and the answer is yes and no. Yes, if you're using frames to including your own content, within the same domain name, and No if you're including content from external website (which you don't own or try to promote)

However, We recommend trying not to use them at all, unless you have a very specific reason to. There are few instances were IFRAMEs, for example, are needed to embed some external content, like advertising scripts, widgets or plug-ins. As mentioned, as long as the embedded content is not yours, and it's not search engine manipulative (i.e. stuff keywords/content with NOFRAMES/IFRAME or some sneaky JavaScript redirects) don't mind. On the other hand, if the "framed" content is yours, don't use frames to embed it. There are other techniques, i.e. server side includes of POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) to do that.

There are 2 particular situations where you can be at:

a) You already have a website relying on frames or,

b) Your planning to build a page with frames

For b) We recommend forgetting about using frames as they only have disadvantages (see below). For a) We would recommend IFRAME optimization techniques (read the rest of the article for that) and rethinking your website structure not to depend of frames.

Keep in mind that as well as with any other html tags, you should first think of frame tags in terms of user experience, accessibility, usability and only then in terms of search engine optimization.

So, why is using frames such a bad idea? Below We listed some of the disadvantages. Unfortunately, We can't think of any advantages, but feel free to come with pertinent counter objections:

* Even since 1996 usability expert Jacob Nielsen explained Why Frames Suck (Most Of The Time) * It will be impossible to target keywords to specific SEO themed landing pages for your backlinking campaigns, since you cannot link to individual pages built with frames * Frames make it harder for visitors to bookmark your page, or add them to their favorites. The bookmarks will always point to your home page, which might not be the page they wanted to bookmark. * Sharing "framed" URLs is impossible * The content of an IFRAME isn't part of the parent page and isn't going to be indexed as such (if at all) * Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but they don't guarantee that they will

If you needed more:

* Frequently, it's not possible to print a page with frames * FRAME, FRAMESET and NOFRAMES are not supported by HTML5 (finally!) * The content of the IFRAM belongs to the site which you insert in the IFRAME, not to your site and therefore will be taken into account for rankings * The content within an IFRAME may be spidered and indexed but no PR is passed through the SRC attribute

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an SEO Services that provides Internet Marketing Services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com