Search Engines and Frames

[Gavin Keating]

Re: Search Engines and Frames.

My web site has been constructed in a frames environment.

To keep pages opened via a search, in context in the framed environment, the following script suggested by Search Engine Watch / Danny Sullivan September 15, 2005 & March 15, 2007 has been inserted into the head of each feature page.

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
if (window == top) {top.location.replace("FRAMESET PAGE NAME HERE"); } //-->
</SCRIPT>

The code works exactly as intended – thanks Danny.

Yahoo seems to have no issue and is slowly getting through the site

The issue is that Google seems to be dropping the pages that contain this code from the index.

Would this be my imagination or is Google treating legitimate frameset pages as gateway pages and penalising the site for it.

I am open to suggestions or options to the above script if this is the case.

Any help would be much appreciated

Cheers

Gavin

[huebdoo]

So 1998 Called ... it wants its frameset back .... and its copy of Saving Private Ryan.

Why in gods name are framesets even being used today

anyone?

[Marcia]

JS redirect may have their use when absolutely necessary, whether properly implemented or not, but there are ALWAYS problems with using frames, and if the purpose of using them is to avoid repetitive navigation coding, it's easiest and most effectiive to simply use SSI or PHP includes and avoid frames altogether.

Is there any reason why frames MUST be used?

[JohnW]

>Is there any reason why frames MUST be used?

Love to hate them myself - cuz it's true that most people use frames as a result of laziness combined with a lack of understanding how the search engines, and users, deal with them. In addition to how bad it looks to navigate a site where every “page” has the same web address, what you end up with is, at best, pages that can’t be bookmarked or sent as a link by email. Jeesh.

But frames can have a proper use. Pages can be "real" pages and still use framed content as a component. Sometimes the judicious use of frames can be used to help satisfy content requirements for the user while at the same time preventing duplicate content problems for the actual page. And when used this way, you don't care if the framed content gets dropped, duped, whatever - for that matter you could robots block them.

[Confused John]

I promise I'm going to rebuild the site soon, but in the meantime...

I've also got a frames based site www.paxman.co.uk and it's pages are dropping off Google searches. Even though I have a self loading script on individual pages to load the frameset Google used to index individual pages and show their page titles on 'pages from this site'. Now more and more pages are shown with just 'Paxman Musical Instruments' rather than the individual page title - and these are the ones that Google is not showing in searches any more.

Does anyone know what's going on?

Thanks

[Marcia]

John, it's doing exactly what's expected with frames. Google doesn't execute and follow Javascript, but what you do have is when visitors are on a page they're "trapped" because the back button is disabled.

This is what Googlebot is getting for the site, you can see it in the cache:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:zCk27z6WjHUJ:www.paxman.co.uk/+site:www.paxman.co.uk&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

[Confused John]

Marcia,

Thanks for that, but...

Something has definitely changed recently in the way Google is listing the pages from the site and making them available (or not) via searches. I haven't changed the scripts on the individual pages within the site that load the frameset for the last couple of years.

Google used to find those pages, index them on the list of 'pages from the site' (under their page names) and they were constantly top of the list when searched for by key words from the content. A good example of this was individual pieces/titles of sheet music searched for on Google would bring up the relevant page from the sheet music section of the www.paxman.co.uk web site. Now, nothing - and the relevant pages are now listed on 'pages from the site' as Paxman Musical Instruments Ltd rather than their page titles.

So sorry, but still confused

John

[Marcia]

John, they may have at one time found an interior page somehow or other and crawled some others by some internal navigation between pages. But the FACT of the matter is that the site is not optimized the way any site in frames should be.

Google will pay return visits to the homepage of sites, and if they cannot crawl the rest of the site via the homepage (which is exactly the case here), then what are they to do? There's no such thing as isolated orphan pages being a legit part of a site - not without being interconnected with the rest of the site, including the homepage.

Google is getting nothing for your homepage - zero, just a blank - and that's why any pages they found by chance won't stay in. Apparently, they're using an ODP page title and description, because there is nothing else they can go by.

A site simply can't be properly indexed and stay properly indexed without a homepage, and a blank page with nothing on it for the bots simply won't do.

I haven't changed the scripts on the individual pages within the site that load the frameset for the last couple of years.Javascripts mean nothing whatsoever to Googlebot and never did. That isn't even a consideration, it's completely irrelevant where search engines are concerned. Whether or not the site is properly coded to be search engine friendly and crawlable has nothing to do with JS - and that's what it takes.

[Confused John]

Marcia,

Thanks for your reply.

However Google found the site in the past it has certainly got a record of all the pages. If you key paxman into google, click on 'More results from www.paxman.co.uk' under the second result, go to the bottom of the page and click 'repeat the search with the omitted results included' you get a list of the entire site, not just a couple of isolated pages.

What I don't understand is why most of the pages in that list do not have the page titles showing, just Paxman Musical Instruments Ltd (the title of the frameset) - this has only happened in the last couple of months.

Google has obviously found the pages somehow and has listed them, why would they not be included in a Google search?

Thanks again for your help with this, it looks like the javascript based index page which is to do with the shopping system (which someone else set up for me) is the reason why the homepage appears 'blank' to Google.

Looks like I'm going to have to rebuild things to get my old listing status back.

John