Are Framesets bad for Search Engine Rankings?

[jochem]

I have been told that Search Engines have trouble with indexing Framespages. This would result in poor rankings. Is this true?

(I prefer to use DIV-containers with CSS in stead of Frames, but sometimes there seems to be no other option.)

cheers, Jochem :cool:

[PeOfEo]

Yes

[jochem]

Why?

cheers, Jochem :cool:

[PeOfEo]

You can think of a search engine spider as a non graphical browser. It is not going to read your javascript or read the contents of your frames correctly. It is important to design your site in a way to everyone can view it, if you do so the spiders will be able to get to your content easily too and this will improve your rating. I am sure all spiders are not going to render things the same, but this is just a good rule of thumb. I am sure some spiders can access the contents of a frame correctly, but some can't.

[jochem]

Thanx for your reply. The reason why I'm asking is because of this problem (http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=52083). Can you solve it?

cheers, Jochem :cool:

[PeOfEo]

We were just talking about hacking height for ie in this thread (http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52970)

I hope that helps. But the hack that was listed was the same one used in fang's post in the other thread.

[jochem]

Thanx! I've posted a reply in that thread. Let's continue this discussion there...

cheers, Jochem :cool:

[mkda]

This article will help some who absolutely need frames:

http://www.searchengineguide.com/dale/2003/0224_d1.html

[jochem]

Interesting...

cheers, Jochem :cool: