1 reply to this topic

[malcolm]

I am designing a site with a standard look of top banner, left navigation, right navigation for example list of news articles etc and a centre container to hold, the content of pages that are hyperlinked in the left and right nav areas.

I would like to make the centre container an iframe, it has no source attribute, but is used solely, as the target attribute for the hyperlinks in the navigation areas.
The reason, is the top banner is somewhat loaded and most of this content is static, to re-load a whole new page with the top banner gives annoying flashes as it loads. Plus the iframe makes things so easy to code.

My question is, given this scenario and the problem of search engines not picking up iframe content, would they follow and index the pages referenced by the standard <A> tag links in my navigation areas even though on the site they are being displayed within the iframe through the target attribute

[Jill]

I believe the search engines will follow the information in your iframe, but they won't see it as part of the page it's on.

So, the words on the page in the iframe, for instance, won't help that page rank highly for them. They will see the iframe info as a separate page at the actual URL that it is at.

At least that is my recollection of how it works. There is a longdesc attribute that you're allowed to use with the iframe tag, which you may want to look into at the W3C org.

Jill