3 replies to this topic

[keress]

I've been asked to review a site and recommend ways to improve its ranking. It's in a competitive market and I'm amazed to see that it's #15. It has no incoming links that Google recognizes, and it's all in frames. Yahoo reports 161 links, and I see that most of those links are other real estate sites that she and her husband have up.

Aren't frames still an SEO no-no?

Isn't the practice of running multiple sites with cross linking potentially hazardous, running the risk of being perceived as spam?

I also have a question about iFrames. I have another real estate client who subscribes to the IDX MLS listing service. We use the feed from their database on her listings page, called up by an iFrame. Now I'm hearing that iFrames have the same problems as frames, the search engines can't read them. Is there another way to dynamically generate this info so that it's readable by the 'bots? I've been looking at Open Realty. Does anyone know if this can handle listing info in a way that's good for SEO?

It does appear that the sites at the top of this very competitive market do have manually input listing pages. Perhaps this is just a coincidence related to the age of these sites, or does this indicate that they're coming up high because more of their content is readable to the engines?

Thanks

[Jill]

What you're seeing is a great example of how all those little things that so many SEOs warn about, really don't make one bit of difference if your site is truly relevant.

[piskie]

In both conventional Fremes and Iframes, you can use a No Frames tag to present relevent content to the search engines. This should be simmilar to the page content. It can be a bit dissimilar, but completely different would make it Spam.

Another way is to allow the Frame Content pages to be indexed as well as the Frameset and use a JS reload script. This can however (if not done correctly) be viewed as an Auto-Redirect which can have bad consequences.

I have been there for some years with a couple of sites that I inherrited and was able to maintain good positions albeit in not too competitive areas. Interestingly when recently both clients finaly agreed to complete rebuilds into Un-Framed sites, they both greatly increased both ranking and visitors. Some of this however could have been (and probably was) due to better copy content that came with completely New Sites.

Given the choice, I would Never Choose Frames of any sort.

[keress]

What you're seeing is a great example of how all those little things that so many SEOs warn about, really don't make one bit of difference if your site is truly relevant.

Actually, I'm concerned that this much ranking is the result of the duplicate sites they have up that are linking to her site. I consider this risky. Do any of you have any opinions on this? I had a site once that was ignored totally because I had inadvertently left it on my testing server, which eventually got a lot of traffic. It was apparently perceived as the 'real' site, while the actual site was viewed as an affiliate and ignored. Has anybody else had an experience like this?