Why framesets are bad for SEO

So you're interested in frames (or framesets) are ya? Nothing wrong with that I suppose. They have there uses, but in terms of SEO they will limit you sites success and in this article Im going to show you why.

Lets dive straight in ... you're sitting in a chair, as you are now, but instead of absorbing the alpha rays from your monitor there are, instead, five ceramic bowls and one glass bottle on the table in front of you; you know this because you are told this - you, my friend, are blindfolded.

Bare with me my search optimisation friends ... all will become clear

Reaching forward you place you hand inside the first bowl and remove one of the many like objects within i.e. you pick out something from a pile of similar somethings from within the bowl.
The object is small, about the size of the ball from within your mouse. Only its not round. One side is perfectly flat whereas the other is curved. On the curved side you can feel slight bumps - dimples almost - and lots of them. The object is tough but squashable. If you so wished you could mulch this object between your fingers, leaving a dripping, fibrous mess in your destructive wake. Satisfied? Good, then its onto bowl two.

Reaching into bowl two your fingers sink into a sea of tiny spheres (about half the size of your mouse ball). Each one rolls around trying to accomodate your probing fingers. Removing a single sphere you role it around the centre of your palm. It is almost completely spherical aside from a small indentation at its north and south poles. Squeezing the sphere causes it to pop leaving a lot of liquid and a little sticky tissue between your fleshy talons.

Bowl three contains the opposite of bowl two. Cubes (are cubes the opposite of spheres? For this example, yes; but maybe this is something we could revisit at a later date .. with a search engine marketing twist or course). Removing a cube you notice it to be much more substantial than the contents of bowl two. Its heavy, its firmer, it approximately the same size, if not a little larger, than your mouse ball.
Each side is perfectly flat and leads to an, every so slightly rounded, edge. Testing the compressile strngth of this object you notice that the outer most corners of the object seem to breakdown under the pressure you excrt whereas the inner core appears to remain fixed and solid. |Some liquid runs down your fingers are you place this slightly distorted mass back into its bowl.

Bowl four, contains what can only be described as rough, yet incredibly flexible, paper. The edges of this thin material are course yet easily pliable.You can crunch it, tear it and much it easily enought. Each fragment appears thin but with very fine ridges on one side. It is no bigger than a fifty pence peice.

Upturning the bottle a little liquid runs quickly onto, then over, your palm. You notice the sticky sensation on the back of you palm first as the liquid drops quickly to the floor. Its texture is not unlike water but with a distincly tacky residue.

Before we examine bowl five, what have we got? Can you guess what is in each of the bowls? Do you know what liquid was in the bottle? Do you know what would happen if we mixed all four bowls and the contents of the bottle together?

Well, the bowls contained sliced strawberrys, whole blueberries, cubed melon and freshly picked mint (respectively) with the bottle containing 1.5 litres of Amaretto liquor and according to Chef Gino D'Acampo we have the ingredients to a fruit salad.
Did you guess right? On all counts?!
The truth of the matter is that unless I was able to describe the contents of each of the bowls in such minute, scientific detail you probably wouldnt have guessed the contents of bowl five, the fruit sald; or that bowls one to four, along with five tablespoons of the liquid from the glass bottle, had gone into bowl five to create something that was more than the sum of its parts.

Is this seach engine marketing or cooking for beginners?

By using frames, or framesets, in your website you are splitting up the ingredients of the page, forcing the Search Engine Spider to consider each in turn (just like you did with bowls one to four) and then making the Spider predict what your page, as a whole, was actually about.

How can I improve my cooking skills?

If you can, avoid using frames. With modern techniques such as CSS you can recreate the look of a frameset without actually having to split up your page content through several mini-component pages. The following can create a smiliar look and feel:

<div id="amaretto" style="height: 100px; overflow: scroll;">
<p style="height:300px;">Glug</p>
</div> If you have to use frames, and CSS workarounds just won't do, then pleaseuse the <noframes/> tag along with your frameset code. This will give the Spider a good indication of what the page is about before following the links to the individual mini-component pages; Like so

<body>
<frameset>
<frame source="sliced-strawberry.htm" name="Strawberrys"/<
<frame source="blueberry.htm" name="Blueberrys"/<
<frame source="cubed-melon.htm" name="Melon"/<
<frame source="mint.htm" name="Mint"/<
<frame source="five-spoons-amaretto.htm" name="Amaretto"/<
<noframes>
So, you like fruit salad do ya?! Well what better way to spend a summer evening than to enjoy this wonderfull fruit salad dish (somprising of Strawberrys, Blueberrys, melon and Mint) that the italians call <em>Macedonio di Frutta</em>.
</noframes>
</frameset>
</body>

And with that, there is nothing left for me to say other than, buon appetito!

I originally wanted to call this article Why framesets are bad for SEO : Or how I learned to love fruit salad, but given the focus of the opening paragraps thought that might have given too much away.

You have been reading Why framesets are bad for SEO which was posted on Sunday, June 26, 2005.
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