Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Iframe redirect bad for SEO?
-
Hi,
I have a website (http://www.blowingminds.de) wich I put a spreadshirt shop into via iframe.
The thing is I am not sure on how the iframe effects my SEO? Can I just optimise the main domain for search?
Well I want the spreadshirt shop to be found under the domain name (www.blowingminds.de) but the only real way to do it is by implementing an iframe because each spreadshirt shop has its own subdomain eg.: blowingminds.spreadshirt.de but the only real way to do it is via iframe, as they do not offer a complete domain redirect. (Or have I overseen some other way?)
I hope you guys can help me on this one

Thanks in advance.
Malte
-
Thanks for catching it, really. I actually laughed, and while kicking myself said...bright one bigfish.
Best
-
Thanks Robert, much appreciated. Your answer here is certainly detailed and well thought out, should be of help, nice one

-
Simon is correct, I was being over simplistic and imprecise. From GWMT: Google supports frames and iframes to the extent that it can. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't correspond to the conceptual model of the web.
The content can be indexed but it will typically be from the originating url as opposed to the destination url.
The question was: How does the iframe effect my SEO? Can I just optimize the main domain for search? I want the spreadshirt shop to be found under the domain name (www.blowingminds.de)
As it stands now, from looking at www.blowingminds.de, there is nothing outside the iframe. All of the iframe urls resolve to the subdomain = blowingminds.spreadshirt.de. So, once shopping begins, a product is selected for further consideration, then you are redirected to the subdomain.
If the SEO he is speaking of is that of www.blowingminds.de, and if by I want the spreadshirt shop to be found under means that when someone searches on a search engine for it I want them to find blowingminds.de and not blowingminds.spreadshirt.de then, it is likely he is going to be disappointed.
While I agree that user experience is important, Spreadshirts appears to have developed an affilate model that utilizes an iFrame wherein they keep all the juice. They do not want blowingminds.de to become stronger than spreadshirts.de. They are fine with the subdomain gaining authority (this is my opinion).
So, it would appear what he is asking is (for practical purposes) not doable. He can either use the subdomain provided by spreadshirts: .blowingminds.spreadshirts.de or redirect to that from an Iframe which is provided.
Good catch Simon. Helps keep us on our toes to be more precise.
-
i would do a request on the iframe and stream it inot the page, this may get messy with forms posting and stuff
-
Content in an iFrame can be indexed, that's the biggest issue here. iFrames have a URL all of their own, so are a page in their own right. Sometimes they are wrapped in a Frameset, which can tie them together to produce a whole normal page.
If their is any way to avoid using an iFrame, then go for it. If not, then it's not just about SEO anyway, Usability is also very important and it's often a compromise that has to be made.
So do what's best for the User Experience and cater for SEO afterwards, which could be using a 'NoIndex, Follow' tag on each iFrame and an 'Index, Follow' tag on the overall main page URL.
Regards
Simon
-
Malte
First content in an Iframe cannot be indexed. Your site http://www.blowingminds.de has all content inside an IFrame so no value for SEO.
With some of our sites where a product/service provider provides their info via feeds to an iframe, we build the site to have its own content, etc. and place an iframe on the page with the feed coming in. (In the US we see this a lot with real estate sites though it appears to be going away even there). If we want to optimize around something within the Iframe, we have to optimize what is outside the frame in order to do so.
As it stands now, unless I have missed something here, your site has no chance at Domain or Page Authority.Hope this helps
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
-
Revolution Sliders - Still considered bad for SEO in 2018?
Hi guys, I have a question about revolution sliders. Are they generally speaking still technically considered to be bad for SEO? I've done some research on this topic however most of the information I can find dates back to around 2009-2012, when sliders were mostly java and flash based. It seems that back then they were considered to be bad for SEO. Is this still the case? We use revolution sliders because it's easy for us to overlay text and because it scales to mobile automatically. It also allows us to put alt texts and image titles in there - we don't use them for the purpose of sliding images. Would there be any technical reason why a slider would be considered bad for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rswhtn0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?
Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?
I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish1 -
If you have an unlimited SEO budget, what would you do?
Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0