When web designers first included frames on their web pages, most of us liked what we saw. A frame seemed like a good idea, as it enabled pages to view more than one page within the same browser, aided navigation for users on the site and allowed consumers to view more than one piece of content at the same time. Framing looked good and gave a professional edge to a website and was a web design technique used by companies worldwide.
Over more recent years we have seen a decrease in the use of framing, mainly for the reason that incorporating it into a website could have negative effects on the success of that site’s page ranking. There have been many debates as to whether the use of frames does directly impact on search results, however SEO experts now realised that it does change the way in which search engines pick up our pages.
Within a normal web browser the main frames and the sub frames are picked up quite easily, however the problem when it comes to search engines is that apart from the index or main frame which is usually a HTML format, the other frames are often created using a format such as SRC which spider crawlers cannot pick up. This means that apart from your title links, nothing else will be seen.
As Google has developed it has been able to follow some SRC links, however the issue again here is that the way in which your site is created for the framing means that some of the content and navigation bars will be missing when linked to via Google. With content being so crucial now in terms of search engine criteria, creating a site which makes your content practically invisible to a search engine seems like website suicide.
In the earlier days of web developing, coding and meta tags were all that mattered and framing worked a lot better. The likes of Google could pick up the text in your main frame tags and coding fine and with professional SEO services being fairly new, the quality of content was not as crucial to page ranking. Nowadays however, search engines such as Google look for relevant and natural content, so if your framing codes are getting in the way of your content then it is highly likely your page ranking will suffer.
Professional companies have recognised this problem and there are ways around it. It is possible to create noframes tags, however in order for these to still be detected and be displayed properly you need to recreate your content with these tags. With all that being quite a lot of hard word it is just as simple to create a website with no frames at all. If you are currently using framing on your site then now is probably a good time to have a revamp on your website and discard some of your framed pages. That is not to say that framing has died completely, but to favour the search engines it is possibly best avoided.
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Posted by James.
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