SEO and iFrame

Very curious question for the SEO gurus out there:


Would having an iframe 100% in width be "bad" for your SEO? Would it get penalized? Lets say you have stuff at the top of the iframe and at the bottom, no more than 600ish words, and a main iframe in the middle [100% in width, and lets say... 900px in height -> basically being the "main object" of the website]. I assume the bots can see the iframe code since it is available through page source, but would it hurt in SERPS? Get banned?

Just sitting and wondering about this and can't really find a specific answer using any SE searches. Been wondering about this for 2 days now.


EDIT: I understand anything within the iFrame cannot be indexed at part of the page already. But I want to know about the actual page where the iframe code is placed on.

Thanks

 

I'm not a guru but you can try this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo+iframe

Plenty of infos

 

it won't get your banned and won't avoid the bots from seeing it, but if you can - try to avoid iframes

 

Well basically I don't really want the page within the iFrame indexed -- it's just a matter of having it shown and whether it will hurt me or not (Worried that the bots will think the website is spam + penalize it).

I appreciate the responses. Thank you for the SEO iFrame (Duh, shoulda searched that before, lol)

Rep's added!

 

careful with iframes, cloakers use that

 

Actually this is what I'm worried about:

2. Spam technique 2 - 100% Frame

This technique is a form of cloaking. On clicking a link in Google's search results, the page you are taken to has the URL of the page you expect, but a frame is used to show the contents of a completely different page.

The result is that Google's spider indexes and ranks the original page, but the page shown to visitors is a different one.

This is considered spam.


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I was going to start hosting some of my pages and having my parked domains iframed, but install things like the heat maps and analytics to see what goes on with them... just worried that they will get banned, etc. from SE... not sure that plan is going to work anymore!

 

"Would I get penalized?"

Everytime I read this I believe people have no freedom of speech and expression, always fearing for whatever reason.

It's good stick to standards on web design and good practices for SEO and boosting traffic, but if you are going to limit your potential to "satisfy" a search engine, where are people leaving their own creativity and satisfaction?

By the way, regardlesss the "gurus" opinion, frames doesn't really matter at all.
Lots of well ranked MSN pages (among other big sites) are based on frames. The important fact is adding optimized content between the <noframes> and </noframes> tags.

 

Iframes are not recommended.You can try viewing your particular page here:
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

write the full url of your iframe page.See if it shows everything.

 

iFrame will not really get you banned unless you abuse it.

The main reason why frames should be avoided in SEO is 2 main reasons.

1. The content read by search engines for you page may NOT consider the included frames. Thus your keywords are actually excluded.

Although search engines are getting smarter today, I believe this is no longer a main issue. But it is still better to avoid this problem.

2. If the source of an iframe gets index and a person clicks on the search result, they will only see a part of the page and not the complete page they supposed to see.

Although there are ways to get around this. like checking the referring URL and it is it is not the source file then redirect to the source file and box in the frames again. But why even hassle doing that?

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Not related to SEO, but related to usability.

It has been the on-going trend in in Web 2.0 for increased font sizes. And large fonts in iframes for long bodies of text is scrolling forever. It is like looking at a lot of text through a hole. Makes it inconvenient for the reader.

But if you really want a scrolling box effect within a page, then just use a div with overflow:auto and it will be more search engine friendly.

Hope that helps.

 

Iframes are bad

They look ugly + search engines don't like those so for SEO is no good

 

Thanks for the information. Can you explain by "abuse" ?

I think I may plan on doing something stupid. My intention is to get a website that has been receiving some traffic through SE ( it's ranked #1 for an OK term, gets only 300ish visits/month ) and have the content of another one of my related sites shown instead. I wanted to keep some of the content already on there, but have the other site overpowering, you know? Would want to inform viewers that it is an iframe or something, but just weary about losing the spot on the SE, although it was fairly easy to achieve. I really don't want the content within the iframe indexed, so it doesn't bother me that the bots can't read it.

Not sure if I'm going to be doing that, since the website is important and would be a problem for me if it gets banned .

Is that considered abuse? iframe of another site at the top, and leaving a couple of my articles at the bottom for the SE.


Rep'd everyone who has replied to this thread. Thanks a lot for the information!

 

The page the i-frame is on won't be hurt by the iframe. It's the content of the frame that doesn't get indexed as well. The page the iframe is on should have content besides the iframe, or there is nothing for google to index in the first place.

It's hard to imagine why you would want that - but if you really do want that, go right ahead. Google is not the iframe police.

 

Simple iframe = no seo

 

Agree. iframe = bad. Plain and simple. Avoid them.