Well, I wouldn't use them myself - maybe a few years ago yes, but I'm sure we all agree - frames have had their day..... Haven't they ?
Taking more than an a passive interest in the source code of a site who ranked above mine for a particularly juicy keyword today, I was staggered to notice how fantastically successful their contrived SEO efforts had turned out to be.
To rank so well in google, basically they had a framset with a single frame - no multiple rows or columns here, essentially a lone "wrapper frame" (maybe I'll get quoted as coining that phrase if no one else already has..) where the content of their frame source was un-optimised drivel, but the targetted tosh in their <noframes> tag was keyword stuffed to perfection....
It didn't make any real sense in english; had no tables or javascript or anything else that; (presented the content in any readable form for the user - OR) moved the keywords away from being in closest proximity possible to the <body> tag - there wasn't even so much as a single <p> tag in there to break up one bit of propagandist SEO speak from the next.
You would think wouldn't you that if we can spot stuff like this, the search engines - especially the nominally brighter and more pro-active ones, like google, could too, and act upon it? The frameset ranked at number one for a keyword having 1000's of searches per day - the source file for that single frame didn't do anything like as well.
- A single frame in a frameset; easy bit of C++ needed to analyse that eh! We can forgive them the complexities of interpreting custom classes in CSS, defined in external *.css files that show <H1> etc as the same as standard formatted text but this is a programming and analysis no brainer ?
It really is an easy spammers defence isn't it - the <noframes> tag. Maybe, just maybe, all search engines should disregard anything it contains in this day and age of browsers that support frames fairly well (how many of u fellow nerds out there are reading this in in Lynx eh?) - or at least significantly downgrade the relevance of information contained within them.
I think I said before that I wasn't one to court controversy, hmm.... Might have to rethink that one knowing what some of my design skool colleagues think on this.
rez :learn:
Edited by Jill, 07 October 2003 - 10:19 PM.
