I have one of those clients who loves their site and thinks its great and does nto want to change it. Unfortunatly its framed so google hates the darn thing. Outside of creating a non-framed site or using noframes does anyone know of a way to optimize a site so that it gets spidered correctly? I think I know the answer but I'm not sure.
Why not change the frames to css frames instead? that way the client will not be able to tell the difference in how it looks. If you are worried about the whole page having to reload instead of just the frame you could use AJAX to reload just one element of it.
I thought of CSS just a few minutes ago myself. AJAX is a good idea too. I'm not worried about reloading pages or anything. Personally I just want to re-design the whole site. Its not that great and I think conversions would go up with it if we did. The owner of the site just is resisting change so I am trying to find some solution to it. Those are great ideas though, we'll try those on the owner also.
If you decide to keep the frames, i would spend extra time creating easy to follow link structure on each page. Use a spider like:http://www.dead-links.com/ or http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html to crawl through your site and make sure that it can get through to each page. then maybe go through the site with a lynx viewer and a fine tooth comb to make sure that all your content is easily visible. Your gonna have to spend alot of extra time making a frames site work well for the search engines. You may want to create a redundant part of the site that is without frames. Or, just explain to your customer that he sacrificing his SE rankings for the frames. Sometimes clients dont care much about rankings, they just want the site the way they want - regardless if it is ineffective.
It would be cheaper for the client to just redesign the site I think instead of making sure the frames work. I think we are slowly convincing her. I think the redundancy is the best and easiest way if she demands on keeping the frames. We are hoping that the issue of the all mighty dollar will show her that she needs to update the site. Anyone know of any good resources that we can point the client to show her how awful the frames are? I did find a bunch of things but want to see if anyone else has any ideas on where to go/
Maybe show the client what their site looks like with a lynx viewer and/or do a search for one of the keyphrases they want to rank well for and show them that none of the top ranked sites use frames.
Gmail is interesting, its built on frames and if you try to view only one of the frames, it mysteriously reloads the page into the framed version again.
If you do decide to use CSS Frames instead of standard HTML Frames, which you should, you can get started by having a look at this example page: CSS Frames Example Page Read about the drawbacks of using HTML Frames: HTML Frames vs CSS Frames Good Luck