It is an often-quoted fact that for SEO marketing, framesets are an obstacle, and this is certainly a true fact. But, in fact all HTML formatting is an obstacle of some form, and specific tactics must be employed that utilise the features of the HTML coding in such a way as to be 'friendly' to search engine spiders. In other words, dealing with the limitations of framesets is an issue that should be tackled in the same way that any other HTML limitation should be - by careful planning.
Here are a few obvious facts about framesets:
1) Framesets are not pages, but are in fact layout instructions to tell browsers to display multiple pages in one browser window.
2) Some (older) browsers are unable to process the frameset (layout) instructions, and ignore them completely.
3) Many older spiders are unable to process the frameset (layout) instructions, and ignore them either completely or partially.
4) Therefore in a poorly planned frameset layout, there is a high risk that important content will not be indexed by search engines
It appears from the simple facts above that framesets are indeed a slippery path to poor SEO.
BUT! The simple facts above are not the entire story. Lets ignore the actual layout for a moment, and look at the pages that you want displayed. Lets say you have three frames in your frameset, so there are three pages that you want to display at once. Imagine now, that instead of displaying the pages all at once, you want to display them one at a time. The obvious way to connect them in this way is by standard HTML links. Now put yourself in the (eight) shoes of a spider. Search engine spiders look at pages one at a time, so how can we help spiders to get from on page to the next? - By including links between all the pages.
Also, framesets come with a little friend (HTML would be a lonely world without little friends). That little friend is called the NOFRAMES tag. This tag defines the text that will be displayed by browsers that cannot construct framesets, and also the content that will be read by spiders that cannot navigate the framesets. Therefore, by carefully controlling the content of the noframes tags, it is possible to gain good search engine listings, even for the frameset page itself.
The one last issue is that any page that should be displayed in a frameset, but subsequently gains a search engine listing, will display out of context. The simplest cure is to use JavaScript to check whether on not the page will load in context, and if not reload the context with the page in the correct frame.
I assert that the above arguments prove that framesets can actually become a powerful tool in the attempts to gain good search engine listings, and in fact are more of a help than a hindrance.
This article was first published on 11 April 2002 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
