Optimizing Your Frames Site for Search Engines - Some Problems Frames Sites Present to SEO
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1. No content
As you can see, there is no spiderable content here. With no content on the master frameset page, there is no way for a search engine robot to determine what your site or page is about, or if it is relevant to any search queries. So if content is King, then having no content is like being the unimportant stable boy, so to speak. Having no spiderable content will keep you from being indexed in search engines.
2. Navigation
Furthermore, since search engines do not understand the <frames> tag, there is no way for them to know how to navigate the frames, or that they should then visit the left navigation pane for any internal site links, the content frame, or anywhere else for that matter. Chances are, a search engine spider will scan this source code, determine there is no content to be indexed, and then move on to the next page they can crawl, only to encounter the same issue. If your whole site is in frames, you can probably see how this will present a problem with being indexed properly. In a nutshell, if your site uses frames ineffectively, a search engine robot will encounter your frames page as a dead end with no content, and will not index it.
3. Bookmarking
Using frames makes it impossible for a viewer to bookmark your individual site pages. While this may simply seem like an inconvenience to the visitor, it actually also has an effect on your search engine marketing. Many webmasters track bookmarked pages in their web stats, in order to find out which landing pages are effective and to improve their site by eliminating pages that are not effective. You cannot discern individual page bookmarks with frames. This will have a direct effect on efficient use of your web statistics in your marketing efforts.
4. Backlinks
The same applies to linking to your pages. If you provide pages to be used in your backlinks or as landing pages, you will either have to call out the exact content pages, which means you lose any benefits of using frames in the first place, or link only to your main site. This could present a problem for your linking strategy, especially if you have many good landing pages.
5. Meta Tags
Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Fine, I’ll just make sure I write good title, description, and keyword tags to make sure the search engine knows what my site is about.” While this sounds like a good idea at first, we should explore this misconception a little deeper. When meta tags are scanned by those search engines that still use them (I might mention that Google does not), the problem you run into is that since there is no spiderable content in the master frameset source code. Meta tags that do not match content are very likely viewed as spam. Thanks to many webmasters that abused the meta tags in the past, many search engines employ filters that compare keywords and descriptions to the page content, in order to remove the irrelevant spam pages, or completely disregard them altogether.
The abusers of meta tags have been known to list meta keywords and descriptions that have either very little to do with their content, in order to capture traffic from highly searched keywords to manipulate the SERPs, or have been guilty of keyword stuffing. “Keyword Stuffing” means loading up the meta tags with keywords, by repeating the same word over and over. Since this abuse, the filters implemented by the search engines have been effective at not only weeding out the offending spammers, but frames sites with no content and the use of meta tags as well.
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