Acceptable techniques when using frames

[tbseo]

Hi,

A few weeks ago a company came to me with the question if their frame-based web-site was optimized properly. Here´s what the site did:

There was a set of additional pages created especially for the search engines, however, with all visible text. These pages formed the content pages of the website and were all properly indexed by Google.

When a visitor from the search engines would click on the link from within the search results they were initially taken to the content page, which included a state checker in PHP to check whether or not the site was loaded within it´s frameset. If not, the visitor was redirected to another url showing both the content page as well as the header and navigation pages used in the frameset.

So what we have is:
- a set of pages especially created for spiders
- a redirect

When we read the Google guidelines to the letter, this shouldn´t be an acceptable technique. And allthough I wouldn´t know of any other way to optimize frames based pages, it has has led to a good discussion between us and a collegue-SEO firm. Not in any negative form by the way, but still a discussion.

Does anyone of you know:
- if Google has given an explicit opinion about this type of technique
- if there are any other good alternatives?

Kind regards



Wolter

[seomike]

I posted a while back on how to solve this... lemme find it...ahh here it is

post #8
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=1710

you just need to change the frames sets to includes. easy as that. Then drop the doorways.

[Chris_D]

The real issue is that framesets are an anomoly. Search engines break the frameset, and index the component parts, as each one is a unique URL. So if you have 3 pieces (eg header & nav; content; footer) each gets indexed separately.

So - as SEOMike describes in his very comprehensive tutorial referenced above, you can use includes to fix this in a php environment.

Another alternative is to use javascript to detect whether the frameset has been orphaned, so that when a searcher clicks on the indexed 'content' page in the serps, the 'broken' frameset gets rebuilt for a graphical based browser running Javascript. Obviously won't help if the user has Javascript disabled. Here's an example of how to do it:

http://www.echoecho.com/jsframes02.htm

Of course - the best solution is just don't use frames.

:)