The effect of frames on SEO.

[JJaffiliates]

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What effect do frames have on SEO? for example, how could it be improved at http://ukgraffiti.com

Thanks in advance, for your help.

[accelerator]

Generally speaking they are pretty bad for SEO because they block the spider from going through all the links in the site.

Rgds

Accelerator

[DioBach]

What effect do frames have on SEO? for example, how could it be improved at http://ukgraffiti.com

Thanks in advance, for your help.

I'd kill 'em dead, asap. 1. It's not 1998 and 2. You're making most of your content invisible to the search engines.

You can achieve a lot of what you want (fixed navigations, headers, footers, etc.) with CSS and have it all spiderable. Think about all the major websites in the world, and tell me how many of them use frames? There's a reason for that.

[befuddle]

The most simplest way to show the negative impact of frames:

Visit the webpage in a browser.
Click View then Page Source.

What you see is what the search engine sees, which isn't a lot apart from a lot of meta keywords.

[Barry]

Another reason its bad is that even if your site is spidered pages appear in the index without any of their navigation or headers and the page becomes unusable for any visitor arriving there.

Ta

[axod]

Spiders will have no problem following frames and indexing the content within individual frames - it's not that they are blind to this content or anything.
BUT
They will then likely index those frames individualy, which will not make sense for visitors. (For example a visitor might get a search result pointing to JUST your navbar).

Of course you can do things to remedy this, such as putting js code in each of your frames to check that it's in a frame and not alone in the window - if it's in the window it can quickly redirect users to the frameset page... but that's not a great solution.

You could also have a <NOFRAMES> tag or whatever, which spiders would probably use to index the main page which might help.

Frames also just look bad for this sort of thing. There are instances where frames are still useful, and look fine - anonymous web proxies for instance - have a 'toolbar' frame at the top, whilst you browse the web in the lower frame.

For SEO though you want to have as much of your content in the main html page... not in frames or iframes or images. That way the spiders can acurately record what a user will see in terms of content, when they visit that page...

I'd get rid of the frames and just use CSS and IFrames if you really need them.

Also red on green text isn't great, and navbar on the right is just a bit weird and unintuitive

All just my 2c, I could be talking a load of rubbish for all I know

[Brendon]

Frames are generally bad. They break the content up into separate sections, so the whole can't be indexed, allow orphan content with no nav to be indexed etc. There are uses for them (like the anon proxies example), but unless you know you have a real reason to use them, they should be avoided really

[JJaffiliates]

Thanks for all your replys.

[moredial]

If you have 2 sites, one framed and the other not.

If the framed site is written and coded well, the non-framed site has an uphill battle to beat the framed site.

Most of the comments here refer to badly written and coded framed sites and do not apply if you know what you are doing. Using frames makes it much easier to get page relevance at the optimum levels, etc, etc, etc. Treat an iframe the same as a frame when writing content and internal navigation.

Having a quick look at some pages on your site - most frames don't have any content that can be SEOed so I would be tempted to even block the bots from seeing them. Use the time saved by improving the loading rate of the thumbnails.