Are iframes bad?

[warpdesign]

We have a client that has a shopping cart and "store front" that is hosted on a third party site. We built a website for him that uses an iframe for the shopping cart section so the user doesn't leave his site when viewing the store front. So far so good. Now my company uses Websense to filter web traffic (so we aren't looking at anything naughty at work :rolleyes: ) and this client's site comes up as "malicious website" when I try to view it. I contacted websense and they said it was because of the iframe.

So that got me to thinking, is using iframes a no no for SEO? Are there any alternatives when you HAVE to have content/pages from another website on your own?

[radhika]

iframes, frames, content between javascripts are not well indexed in search engines as far as I know.

I have to takeout the contact form on whole site that is in iframe and keep is as seperate webpage with a link 'Contact us'.

[khalidh]

it is extremely difficult for a crawler to get to a page that is controlled by an iframe in a natural way. So, you can not expect Google to look at your site, and figure out most of the layout on its own if you use iframe. That being said, if you use a site map to tell the crawler about the different pages on your site, you should not have a problem. We had several pages indexed on Google although they were created using iframes.

Khalid