[thelist] Re: Metatags - we are not ranked anywhere in the search

Chris Heilmann lists at onlinetools.org
Thu Feb 24 08:41:45 CST 2005


> Hello,
>
>    This thread has been very helpful to me, since SEO is a topic I never
> feel I have a good enough handle on. I hope it has been helpful to
> Sylvia, too.
>
>    I have a follow-up question. Understanding the importance of a
> well-coded site, clean structure, and so on, I am supposing that frames
> are also a no-no, since they split the single visual presentation into
> separate component pages, each of which probably does not present the
> entire context, have a title, etc. However, I haven't seen this
> explicitly said in the several resources I've looked at from those some
> of you have suggested. I have a friend who asked me a while back about
> SEO, and I referred him to what I knew (including this list), but I
> think his site is using some frames. So if those are working against him
> in search engines, I want to tell him that. Are they?

Yes, although you can work around that by adding a good text and links to
all the sub pages in the <noframes> part of your frameset. Then you have
the problem that _users_ who cannot deal with frames will follow these
links and not get a frameset around them.

Bottom line is that a good document for a search engine is like a good
document for screen readers or text browsers - one document with links
that can be followed and that has a proper structure.

There is quite a cool simulator of how google would "see" your site here:
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go

ppk for example uses a frameset for his great resource
http://www.quirksmode.org/ and he has reasons
(http://www.quirksmode.org/about/frames.html) for it. However, it does
stop google short:
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?q=www.quirksmode.org
The homepage itself has a lot more links to follow:
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.quirksmode.org%2Fhome.shtml

That he is still easy to be found in google is due to the great content
and a lot of people linking to the site.

This is something to ponder :-)

-- 
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/



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