Using iframes to deliver content

[dux]

Hi,

I am in a bit of a dilema and would like some advice.

This is the scenario - I have a website offering car desktop wallpapers. This is coupled with a blog. The wallpapers side of the site is using a dedicated script and the blog side is using Wordpress (both sitting in their own directories). The blog side contains press releases, editorials and articles etc.

Witihin the wallpapers section, I would like to include the official press release for a particular car on the page where the thumbnail of the car wallpaper appears. In every single case I will have multiple wallpapers of the same car available and would (ideally) like to inlcude the official document on each thumbnail page. This adds value to the user as they do not need to navigate away from the page for this information (which also appears in the blog side - my initial idea was to link to it).

In order to not raise and flags about duplicate content I have been thinking about sourcing this information via an iframe. The document containing the text will be in a folder that is dissallowed in my robots.txt file.

I have set up a page to see how it works. This is it 2009 Bugatti Veyron wallpapers and would very much appreciate your thoughts on this.

I would like your thoughts on the following - how do search engines feel about iframes? Is this method search engine friendly? By using an iframe am I alerting search engine bots to something they may deem as trickery?

I could paste the text into the page, but that could mean 10's of pages with exactly the same content apart from a thumbnail file name. Maybe that wouldn't be a problem? Most car models will have between 20 and 60 images each, sometimes more.

[datetopia]

It's good for your pages to include that content without iframes. You can use fixed size divs if it's big and you need scroll.
You can probably include the content text files easily with scripting depending on cms scripting language.

[jxm0tbp]

I once had a client that insisted on using IFrames, against my advice... Not sure why they were so set on it, or how they even knew what it was... Maybe it was bc of the whole "i" craze. Unfortunately, their search engine rankings didn't go too far if you know what I mean! I would try the div tags like what datetopia suggests. It's probably your best option.

[chowell]

It's my understanding that an iFrame is read as a separate file, aside from the page it is being displayed on. As such, you would not expect it to help improve the rankings of the page that it is showing up on.

You're much better going with your own unique content and/or skipping the frames altogether.

[powsurfer]

I have recently had the same dilemma and exactly as datetopia has suggested.
You can see thi on the right hand side of our web page Ski Chile & Argentina where we are pulling in snippets from our blog (although this is on blogger).
We can then filter the feed by keywords, our intention being to show news relating to specific countries or ski resorts on the relevant pages although no filters have been applied on the homepage.