SEO impact of an iframed blog is very low ? Right or wrong ?

[jfmonfette]

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

[BedeFahey]

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.

[jfmonfette]

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.

[BedeFahey]

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

[jfmonfette]

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.

[jfmonfette]

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.

[tfbpa]

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.

[jesse-landry]

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.

[tfbpa]

In my research iframes do get indexed, only just by their URL and not by the page the iframe was incorporated in.

[tfbpa]

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.

[jesse-landry]

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