Do frames hurt your ranking?

[InternetBen]

It's my understanding that search engines base ranking on different criteria. Some use links, some use the meta tags, and some use textual content.

If they base a keyword search on textual content, and the index frame page has no content, will that damage your ranking? Or am I wrong.

InternetBen

[brobe]

I don't know that it would hurt your ranking but i don't think it will help any. I personally stay away from frame pages for this fact. Some people swear by them.

I do however believe that some search engines have incorporated techniques to get around this because this isn't only a concern for webmasters but the search engines would like to be able to index these sites so they have made strides toward making this available.

A lot of search engines are old however and still have not made this change.

In this case, I would at least try and put some content in your noframes tags as this is what search engines will see when they crawl your web site.

Another alternative is creating doorway pages, etc. but don't use these to spam the engine but use them to alternatively display your content in a condensed form. Then submit those pages to the engines.

Hope this will shed some light on the subject...

[Ian]

Hi,
One of the first versions of A1 JavaScripts ran in frames and I would say NO to your question, infact I feel if you have your index page set up correctly, can even be better than non framed sites.
I say this because for search engines that rank your site based on the relevancy between your meta keywords and page content you can really load up your index page with content that matters and no one will see it.
I suggest you write in your meta keywords into your index page and then in the body of that page load it with relevant words relating to your site content. These do not have to be sentences, just words seperated by a space and/or comma, make these words in the smallest text possible so it takes very liitle loading and you can really pile them in.
One of the common problems for non framed sites is that the content on their index page often just includes an introduction or similar and when compared to thier keyword relevancy, is very poor.
I hope this helps you solve your query.
good luck.

[Jason]

I've seen a JavaScript out there (I'm sure Ian is familar with it) that I consider a "must have" for a site that uses frames. The JavaScript will make any page that is hit without frames redirect into a frameset. This way you can still promote your unframed pages to the search engines, without worring if your visitors will get the full page navigation. Worth pursuing for any frames user.

[whkoh]

Frames can do the job more properly if code was written corrected.

[fonzerelli_79]

Im not sure if frames do hurt your ranking but i dont care. They can save you hours of time cos when you make a change you only have to do it once, ie you dont have to copy the code to 15 different parts of your site.

I love frames.... and ice cream!!

yum yum chow sum

[Jason]

SSI (Server Side Includes) calls can do the same thing as frames when it comes to quick updates. For navigation, if your menu is called via SSI, all you need to do is update your nav in a text file, and you can update thousands, or even millions of pages all at once.

Personally, I'd only use frames for an online tool, or inside a members section, or an admin, or something of that nature.

I like SSI, and chocolate syrup on my ice cream.

[jollyfactory]

I used to have my site framed, I changed it to tables now. I think it looks better. My website has what? 3000 pages now? And when I add a new section, it takes forever to change the menu bar! I have a program now that does it for me. Code Switcher I think its called.

The thing is, the search engine can spider your pages with a tabled site, and when I changed to tables a few months down the track my site shows up third in Yahoo!

Call it luck, coincidence or someone up there likes me
:) Try searching goku pictures in Yahoo, if my site is still there it should be third. I dont know what I did though