3 replies to this topic

[BeantownSEO]

I was hoping someone on the forum could help me understand how to properly SEO a page using iFrames. Here is the rundown; my company essentially will be adding a series of videos (webisodes) to our website, which feature success stories of people who have used our product. We will be tweaking the homepage to include teaser videos and this will link to a new video page, which will house all the videos in an iFrame. Basically, the iFrame houses all the videos, which are hosted on a third party site by Dramatic Health. Each video is broken down into segments, and we have provided detailed titles, meta descriptions and keywords for each video and it’s respective segments.

Are there any potential SEO drawbacks here, such as the search engines not being able to find the videos? I understand that these videos wouldn't make the greatest media entrants into Google's universal search however it is something we need to be careful of. Also, transcripts are being created for the video too but I am not sure if the text would be in the iframe as well.

Any input would be much appreciated!

[Randy]

The downside is that the iframes are going to be seen as completely separate pages and not part of the page into which they're embedded. Meaning if/when the search engines do pick up those video pages it'll point directly to the iframe page and not to a page that may contain additional content and/or navigation.

You can code that page to make sure it's not a Parent window if you want, then redirect back to to the real page with the iframe inside of it if you want. Whether or not to do this sort of depends upon what the specifics are. The main issue being can users get back to your real site if they end up going directly to the iframe page.

[BeantownSEO]

Wouldn't also be true, in terms of indexing, that the site that is employing the iframe will not get credit from the search engines for the content or media assets? If the content is being displayed on the page by being pulled into the site from another site via the iframe, wouldn't the site that actually is hosting the content get the search engine credit? I have also heard something about Backstage / Onstage or implementing the API on the actual site, thus giving the site the credit and not the other site......not sure if that makes sense or not.

[Randy]

Yes, whatever iframe page contains the actual content is going to be the one that gets credit for it. So if you're using an iframe to pull in content from another domain, that page on that domain is going to get the credit.

Just the same as it's always been with frames and iframes.

For your API question, it's a bit too general to answer. With API's it depends upon the implementation, and there are different ways those can be constructed.

For instance, if the API uses only server side scripting (eg PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, etc) the all of the processing takes place before the content gets loaded in the page. So for all intents and purposes the search engines would see this API content as being part of the landing page on your domain, regardless of where the actual content comes from.

On the other hand, if the API used something like an RSS or XML feed from another location and this information appeared in the code, the location of the XML/RSS feed would get the credit.

And on the third hand, if you were using some fairly sophisticated AJAX (which is really Javascript) to retrieve and display the content it is questionable if the content would even be seen. Yes the search engines (Google especially) are getting better and better at being able to read Javascript-produced content, but it's still fairly spotty. And the more involved the JS routines get the more problems they seem to have.

I've got some tests running on this kind of thing to see if I can sort out where the line in the sand is for getting JS produced content to show up. But it's still pretty blurry at this point. I do still have about 40 or 50 things to test though.