SEO impact of an iframed blog is very low ? Right or wrong ?
-
We're thinking about adding a blog to our site, but our CMS blogging features are not good.
Someone suggested using a wordpress blog and putting it in an iframe on our site.
I replied that all the SEO impact of our blogging efforts will be lost because of the iframe. I am right or wrong ?
If I am right, could you suggest better alternatives ?
Thanks in advance !
Jean-François Monfette
-
You're welcome,
From what I can tell, 2013 features massive improvements in terms of SEO for publishing pages. I'm not sure about the blog, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't a whole lot better.
-
Thanks a lot for this reply, I really appreciate it !
I will share this information right now with our development team. This will help a lot. Also, we are moving to Sharepoint 2013 in the summer. I hope they have improved their blogging features.
-
Hello,
Your question about iframes has already been answered, but I thought I'd share my experiences with Sharepoint as a blog platform...
I've just spent the past few months building a site in Sharepoint with a blog. We ended up coming up with a couple of different solutions from an SEO perspective...
The biggest issues the out-of-the-box blog in Sharepoint (I'm assumine 2010 or 2007 here) faces are:
- Lack of SEO friendly URLs
- No meta description
- The apparent inability to display an excerpt on the homepage of the blog.
- Horrible horrible commenting system
Unfortunately the blog uses a query to pull the posts from a list, and it's a lot harder to modify than a standard page layout.
We've been testing out two solutions:
- Using an article page for the blog post, a content query web part to roll up these articles on a "blog" page, and then used the Byline field on the article as a way to power both the meta description (I can locate the code for you for that if you want) and the excerpt.
We then created "category" pages which contained another content query web part, which attempted to display all posts that had a certain keyword in them.
Finally, we ditched the Sharepoint comments system altogether, and used Disqus (which was surprisingly easy to add to the blog)
It was pretty clunky, but from a purely SEO perspective, it's working out fine.
- That said, we're unhappy with how clunky it is for internal users, so we're now working with an open source solution that enhances Sharepoint's native blog. http://cks.codeplex.com/releases/view/28520
Just this morning we got it to work with Sharepoint 2010. It covers most of the issues I outlined above (though we're still going to implement disqus) aside from the meta description, which is what I'm set to tackle next.
Hopefully this provides some guidance on where you might be able to go while remaining with Sharepoint.
-
Thank you both for your comments. I marked it as answered since you seem to agree on the point and clarified my thinking that we would not receive the sought after SEO value of blogging by using iframes.
I will share your answers with our team and try to look for a proper way of doing it.
-
Our site use Microsoft Sharepoint as a CMS and the blogging features are not good, as I have heard.
We probably could do bdc.ca/blog, but we would probably have infrastructure issue to mix php pages and apsx pages.
-
To add to my comment, one of the problems with my solution starts when your navigation changes, which it almost always does.
A solution to this is to for example to use a php include statement for the navigation/header from your old CMS in Wordpress and only link to your Wordpress main page from the navigation. Come to think of it, if you have a good programmer he/she can probably also make sure that new Wordpress pages and the navigation thereof can automatically be inserted into the navigation of your old CMS.
In short, you just need a designer/coder to port your current theme to Wordpress and a programmer to make sure the navigation stays the same in both CMS's.
-
right exactly this is what I was trying to say; so essentially the Wordpress page would be indexed and the keyword placement and optimization done by the contents of the blog in the iFrame would not lend credit to the domain but instead to the wordpress site making it less than ideal.
You are correct, sir.
-
In my research iframes do get indexed, only just by their URL and not by the page the iframe was incorporated in.
-
Wordpress itself is indeed an option, but I don't really see why you should an iframe.
It is better to install Wordpress yourself, on your own website in a different directory and put a link in the navigation of the old CMS to the Wordpress directory and have your current theme ported to a Wordpress theme. This way your website will look the same in both your old CMS and Wordpress, as I think this was part of your initial hesitation of not immediately using Wordpress on your own site.
As for SEO impact, that depends on how you look at it. By using an iframe your website does not benefit from the additional content association, but when you link back to your main site from the iframe, that will carry a bit of weight.
But an iframe is definitely not an ideal solution, no.
-
You are correct. The text of the iFrames will not be crawled. However, if you are using the blog simply to gain backlinks then it MIGHT work... keyword "might." depends what people share, the wordpress link or your website link.
Why can't you put the blog on your site? I don't understand this part, my apologies. IMO there's no better place for a blog than yoursite.com/blog
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Wordpress pagination and SEO
Hello Mozzers, We have incorporated Wordpress blog in our website. The blog has a fair share of what we believe is a valuable content both for the users and SEO. We have reached the point where our content is getting pushed out to pages 2, 3 and etc. 99% of the older content is still relevant and useful. However it does get less traffic from the users because it is not on the front page. I am dealing with it by showing "related posts" and get some traffic through that. I feel that the content that got pushed from the front page of the blog gets less love from search engines as well.The my permalink structure is /%postname%/ only, however when Wordpress adds page/1/ the SEO ranking appears to drop. Is it because Wordpress adds page/1/ to the address? What is a good way to optimize is? I have 15 posts showing on the front page should I increase it?
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
Is there an SEO advantage to blog content being a child of /blog/ rather than the homepage?
I'm working on a website where all the blog content is listed as separate pages from the homepage, eg: www.domain.com/first-blog-post
Technical SEO | | MillyShaw
www.domain.com/second-blog-post However, it would make my life easier if all blog content was listed under /blog/ so that I could analyse it better in Google Analytics. Eg I'd like it to be: www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post
www.domain.com/blog/second-blog-post The developer is not keen because it would create extra work for him, and he's also said it's a bad idea from an SEO point of view. But is this the case? Presumably with 301s in place it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks for your help!0 -
Blogging on multiple domains
We have three different domains for geotargeting (za,uk and .com). Each site at at the moment has the same content with only country specific details changed like currency etc. What is the best way to get maximum SEO benefit when posting new content.When we post new content should we repost to all three domains (the same content) or will Google only index the url on the domain which is crawled first. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
What are the SEO implications of URLs that use a # in them?
I have several clients who have begun to ask questions about sites that are designed to look like a single page. When you click on a link, the URL changes but it uses a # before (i.e. http://www.kelloggs.com/teamusa**/#**/teamusa/athletes/kerri-walsh.html. What are the SEO implications of having a page set up this way? I noticed that Google has indexed this page but the indexed URL does not include a #. Is Google indexing a separate version of this page? Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Getting rid of low quality
If I wanted to get rid of a batch of low quality pages from the index, Is the best practise to let them 404 and remove them from sitemap files? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Syndicating With Blogs
Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
When to SEO optimize a blog post?
Hi there, Here's our situation: there are two people working on the blog. person 1) writes the posts person 2) SEO optimizes the posts I know this is not ideal but it's the best we can do and it's a whole lot better than no blog. 🙂 I'm the fellow optimizing the posts. I've found that my best SEO efforts usually slightly undermine the readability of these posts -- not in an extreme way, I'm not going overboard with keywords or anything. Rather, things like a sexy & enticing article heading may have to be dummed down for search engines... Because of this dumming down, I like to wait a couple of weeks to SEO optimize our posts, the logic being that we get the best of both worlds: a happy regular readership on topic articles that are clearly described for (and aligned to the terms used by) our search engine visitors What I'm wondering is, Generally: can you see any problems with this setup? would you do it differently? Specifically: does Google (et al) punish this sort of backwards re-writing? and, does it somehow amount to less SEO mojo when done retroactively? Thanks so much for your time! Best, Jon
Technical SEO | | JonAmar0