Frames and Search Engines 1

[OldWilly]

Is there a way to design a site using frames that will also be friendly to the search engine spiders? Any pros and cons to this concept?

 

[mickyjune26]

How does this apply to coldfusion?

Your best bet is to use cfincludes to dynamically include other documents into one page.

 

[xtendscott]

I concure that It is not a CF issue. But the best way to make a current site "more SE friendly" it to have a <NOFRAMES> Content here for Main Frame </NOFRAMES> and make sure the internal page frames have a link structure to other pages. On each internal page you can place a JavaScript to check to see if it is in the frame and if not then reload the page with the Parent frames around it. I don't use this so I couldn't point you to a script but I know they exist do a bit of searching.

There are many fora for this topic. Do a search for "SEO forum" or my favorite

http://www.webmasterworld.com.

 

[OldWilly]

I agree that this is not a CF issue, but my reasoning for placing this question here is this... some of the best commercial sites are written in CF and I thought it likely that some programmers would have been asked to put their sites in frames. (as my client demands).

What I am considering doing is to load index.cfm with a page parameter for each page. "index.cfm?page=xxxx".
Then I will check to see if a session variable exists and if not, I will call in my frameset.

 

[xtendscott]

Some of the best sites are not crawled by search engines because they use session variables, to many variables in URL(keep to 3 or under)0 is better, require cookies, or poor use of frames.

Most developers for CF, ASP, or PHP program and do not pay much attention to Search Engines. I would read up on SE's and do some searches for the Clients industry and point out that when searching you don't find Framed Pages, then still see if Frames would be required.

 

[mickyjune26]

I missed the fact that you were trying to focus on search engines with cold fusion.

Since the cfm pages are compiled prior to reaching the browser, are cfincludes treated as if they were part of the page when spiders go over them?

 

[xtendscott]

Yes, cfincludes are processed on server and are given to search engines the same way a browser would see it.

If you have to use frames the <noframes>main content</noframes> and a usable navigation on the main content page and a good sitemap has worked for search engines. But without the frames the user experience is limited.