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SEO - Why you should not use frames

What is a framed website?

A framed site very often makes for an easily updated website, and many designers opt to use frames for this very reason. They are particularly useful for maintaining very large websites with a large amount of online content.You can usually tell that a site is framed when the navigation bar to the left remains still while all the information in the centre of the page scrolls. With other framed websites there might be a logo or some navigation bar at the top that remains still while the rest of the page scrolls.Using frames on your website is a mistake because search engines cannot navigate the frames, and your website will not get indexed properly.

 

Here's why many framed websites fail to get listed on search engines that use spiders:

 

If you look at the HTML code of a typical framed website, you will see tile, meta and frameset tags, and that's about it! Search engine spiders are programmed to ignore certain HTML codes and, instead, focus on indexing the actual body text. But with a typical framed website, there is no body text for the search engine's spider to index because the text is all on another page (usually the inner framed page). The text on your website’s pages is the single most important aspect of SEO. Therefore, it’s almost impossible to get a high ranking in search engine results with a website that uses frames. 

 

Please proceed to the next page to read what Google has to say about the matter.

 

SEO - Google's statement about frames

The following is copied directly from Google:

 

“Reasons your site may not be included… Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame - because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page. "

 

Source: http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

 

Who wants to argue with Google?

 

There is one sneaky way to optimise framed sites, however. This usually involves targeting key phrases that aren’t very competitive and making use of the noframe tag.

 

SEO - Optimisation for frames

The noframe tag

 

There is an HTML tag called the noframe tag, which gives search engine spiders the information they need to index your page correctly. It was designed to give frames - early versions of browsers that cannot read or interpret the frameset tags — the ability to read the information on a framed website. Simply write a 500-word description of your website with the appropriate use of headers and keywords, and include links to all your inner pages using the noframe tag. Spiders will then be able to read the content of those pages.

 

Google in particular does not afford much weight to the content of a noframe tag. Use its search engine and you’ll see that there are hardly any framed websites in the top 30 search results. Yahoo, on the other hand, can be used to obtain good rankings with the correct use of the noframe tag (strangely enough, ever since it dropped Google as a provider of search engine results). Unfortunately, the best way of optimising a framed website is to redesign it completely or build a new website from scratch.

 

SEO - Why you should not use frames

 

Up until now, everything you have read about frames relates to your front page. But what about the other pages on your website? If you want to get them indexed properly on a framed website it can throw up number of other problems.

Most website designers use frames for easy navigation, with a static navigation bar on the left with buttons that bring up a new page on the right when clicked. With this type of design, however, there is usually no navigational links on any of the inner framed pages. This isn’t good if you’re looking to optimise your website, because you should be able to optimise the inner pages as well. But if you do optimise them and they are discovered in a search, they will show up as ‘orphaned’ pages. These are pages that contain a little of the information, but have no way of allowing the user to access the rest of the website. Experienced Internet users will look at the URL and try to find the root directory, but most users won’t know how to do this. Eventually, the user will get frustrated and close the website. Who knows, the website owner may have lost a potential customer.

 

SEO - Flash is Evil

 

Macromedia claims that flash is "the solution for producing and delivering high-impact websites." What Macromedia doesn’t tell you, however, is that flash makes your website extremely annoying and unusable.

Allow us to explain:

 

Gratuitous animation
Flash has contributed to the ridiculous amount of gratuitous animation on the Internet, and - unlike animated GIFs - flash animations do not respond to your browser's stop button or your keyboard's escape key. Thus, users are likely to close the entire website down, rather than just a section.

 

Splash screen renaissance
By comprising smaller file sizes than GIF animations, flash has single-handedly brought back the splash screen, arguably one of the most irritating Internet experiences. Internet users are usually looking for content, and presenting them with a content-free splash screen is a sure-fire way to annoy them and give them good reason to leave. And who can blame them?

 

Flash websites
Incorporating flash into an HTML page or splash screen is bad enough, but entire websites built with flash are positively evil. First and foremost, flash websites make the browser's back button and address bar useless, and make book-marking pages inside a flash website impossible. Printing flash pages from your browser won’t work either, nor will intra-page keyword searching. Finally, flash sites disable HTML links’ visited and unvisited colours, and this colour-changing feature is the Internet’s most important navigational cue.

 

Flash and search engines
Pages that are built entirely from flash – or ones that are heavily loaded with it - suffer from the same ranking problems as frame sites. There is simply not enough content for spiders to determine the relevancy of the site, and no meaningful ranking is ever achieved.

 

A flash site usually consists of one HTML page (the home page) and all other content is in a flash object. A flash designer’s argument is that the index page is in HTML, which can be read by search engines. They usually say that adding meta tag descriptions will do the trick. Fortunately, we’ve only had one potential client who was naive enough to believe he could achieve good rankings this way.