Frames & Search Engine Indexes [resolved]

[mrstuff68]

Do search engines have a hard time indexing sites with frames? Is there a drawback to using frames?

[penagate]

There are lots of drawbacks to using frames, it is less intuitive layout-wise, it is a combination of documents instead of just one, and yes lots of bots have problems with them. THe better bots follow all links in the frameset but you can never be sure that they will arrive at the frameset page in the first place, they might stumble upon one of your frame pages instead and so when someone follows the link they will only see part of the page.

Honestly, there is no value to using frames, it's far better to use a single file layout. Even IE can handle a table-less, frame-less layout using <div>'s nowadays, and that's saying something.

Demo

In the demo the menu is on the right, you can use the View -> Page Style menu in Firefox to swap it right and left If you bear in mind that that uses exactly the same markup code, you start to see how powerful CSS is compared to frames/tables

[mrstuff68]

I have never done and entire page in CSS but I am going to try it and see what I can come up with

Thanks