Iframe question, will it hurt my SERP, Help!

I've have been working on two new websites for bass fishing for about 3 weeks and have learned a lot about SEO here in this forum to increase my SERP's. I have applied many of the keyword strategies, obtained backlinks, etc.

My current site only has map sketches (done by me) and text describing my key "hot spots" for fishing. I want to revamp my site http://www.floridabasslakes.com by using a professional map building website which provides free html and iframes for the maps which I can copy into my site i.e. links to their site through iframes.

For some keywords, I have pretty good SERP such as: florida bass lakes- position 4, fishing lakes in Florida-position 19, fishing maps for Florida-69, etc. I haven't checked all possible SERP's for different keyword combinations, but for my keywords the results seem good for only being a 3 week old site.

I want to provide better maps to my visitors by using this service. The text will be displayed in the iframe on my site by the map server. I am worried that my SERP's will go down in Google by doing this. Any idea if this is true and if so, how can I incorporate the better maps for my visitors without destroying all the SEO I have already done? All answers are appreciated!

 

The only thing I can suggest is for you to personally research google's crawling algorithm. I only know a little about it, but I would guess the crawler WOULD follow iframes. especially if they are pages in your site. You could also research using a robots.txt file.

I hope this helps.

 

Thanks Mulbane,

What I did was to put the iFrame in, but I left the text in the left column of my site just in case. Don't know if this will be dupe content since my text doesn't show up in the iframe until someone clicks a map spot.

 

I don't think Google follows an Iframe. So text outside of the Iframe is good.


BTW...Do you know Larry?

Larry the Fishing Guide

 

I suggest the robots.txt file along with the alt text for the image that loads in the iframe.

 

google doesn't crawl the info in the iframe.....

 

Yea they treat an iframe like any other frame and ignore the content inside of it.

 

Thanks everyone, good information to know! I guess I'm glad I left my text on the pages, otherwise Google would have seen them empty. Man, got about 10 people today from MSN and checked their Live search and I'm in the top spot for some of my keywords! It's funny how different the search engines are in how they rank you. Thanks again, I was worried about it. Oh well, the text is in the iFrame and on the page.

 

Dont worry with iframe, thousands of websites use i!

 

But having no frames much advisable than the other one(having frames)

 

Many search engines experience problems with framed web sites and as a result may not be indexed correctly. Search engines can only read text and will often index only the part of a framed site within the "noframes" section. ...

 

If you use a robots.txt file properly, you can tell the crawler specifically what you want crawled. The pages in the iframe may not be crawled from the page loading the iframe but by using a robots.txt file you can tell the robot to crawl specific pages, including pages that you use in an iframe.

 

Thanks everyone.

Mulbane, The iFrame I am using is a free mapping utility from another website. I don't know where they store the text that I input into the map utility, that's why I'm leaving the text on my page. I think I have too much text for an alt-image description.

Thanks again

 

As long as you have some good content on the page as well as the iframe you will be fine.