Question about "frames"

[Jerry Murray]

I used the Instant Position site to check my site and optimize it.

Now, the results came back as good, but it said that I have a "Framed site" and that will be a hindrance to the Google spider.

My question is this. What exactly is a Framed site and how do I make my site more Google/search engine friendly?

My url is http://www.heritagehonda.net

Thanks for your input.
_________________

[simonm]

Simple

Google will index your pages. A frame will count as a page. Your visble home page is in fact 4 pages.

The navigation page, main page with the picture of the car and a page with the logo at the top. A further (fourth) page holding all this together. Google will see these as 4 distinct pages, the page holding everything togther hasn't got any real content so will not be well indexed on the search engine.

When somebody does a search for "Honda Dealer in Baltimore" they will most likely see http://www.heritagehonda.net/en_US/f_HomePage_1.chtml as the page referenced as that has the key terms you might want to promote on search engines.

ie you lose the navigation and header.

[Jerry Murray]

Thank you for the help. This site is provided for our dealership, we then make changes to the pages as we see fit. I cannot change the overall structure of the site...that being said, what can I do to make my site more google/search engine friendly?

[simonm]

Without changing the structure of the site - eg using templates. Perhaps have a button on each content page marked 'Home Page' which takes the user to the correctly formatted framed home page. They then have the correct navigation structure. Then even if the user sees the site formatted correctly - ie in the correct frames - the home page button is not too much out of place.

With regard to SEO, make sure each real page or frame is titled (and other seo optimisation) as if that page, outside its framing is all you expect the user to see.

Good luck

Simon

[cyanide]

As a test, try clicking any of those links on your left navbar, by doing this:
right-click and choose 'open in new window'

As you will see the 'inside page'
This is the main page google will index and the page that will show up on search engine results.
You've lost half your page and won't regain them on subsequent clicks.

I used the Instant Position site to check my site and optimize it.

Now, the results came back as good, but it said that I have a "Framed site" and that will be a hindrance to the Google spider.

My question is this. What exactly is a Framed site and how do I make my site more Google/search engine friendly?

My url is http://www.heritagehonda.net

Thanks for your input.
_________________

Hey there>
YOu have a nice site but I see your dilemma.......

Truth is that we designers have lots of fun with frames
but in all honesty the are terrible for SEO as the spiders literally "get lost" in the infrastructure of your sites html code....

So when we use them we have to make sure that Google positioning is not the clients top priority....

In the old days it was much easier to fix your problem w/ out major design change.....as we could use .css to literally put the entire dictionary in one unseen blockquote on an x,y of -50000, 50000

but today if you do that today they will boot you permanently off Google index if you get caught.....

the suggestions above are all very valid........

perhaps in the future you can ask you webmaster to just pull all the content out of all the frames and make full html pages instead......it would really be worth yu effort.....

you see....take this example of a site I did last year.....
go and ask Google for "Sailing Yacht Attila" and under the first return you will see a second return with " [click here for more results from www.sailingyachtattila.com ]" and if you click on the link you will see then an entire "intranet" of all the internal pages of the sailboats website.....covering almost an entire page in Google........

This is becasue each page is coded, titled and metad individually so the googlebot indexes each page like a "little one page website all by itself" and then groups them all together in your domain URL....

OK I hope any of this helps.....

Good luck

DAREN!

[Mac 5]

I agree with an earlier post, may be worth a redesign. If you are bound and determined to keep frames, you could make the homepage, index.htm a doorway page made without frames. Use robots.txt file to limit the search engine to spider only the home page, restrict all other pages. Since all of your eggs are in one basket on the homepage, be sure all of your keywords are used on that page and that page is optimized.