Iframes & SEO

[wcksmith]

I've got a client that wants a site with all content in iFrames. They saw another site they liked & asked if we could do it.  Of course we can technically.  How big a negative hit would they take with SEO?  Is there anything we can do to mitigate it, such as redirects, etc?

Thanks for the help!

[seopet]

If it's for design only, why not use a div with a defined height and set to scroll? Then you get full seo benefits as well.

[wcksmith]

This isn't third-party content - it's content they will post on their site.  They just want it to appear in a static page where the content can be scrolled through in a small area of each page.  It's a print designer that came up with this concept, that we may have to live with.

[seopet]

You will get no seo benefit by using iframes and google will view it as an empty page, so it is really not suggested. A workaround would depend on why the client requires an iframe specifically. One alternative to an iframe is to to use a programming language to grab the content of the third-party website and dump the content as source code onto your page instead of a an iframe. However, you would then need to further program it to recode any links on that page to go back through the script and process the next page the same way. It would take some coding but it can certainly be done and you would then have full seo benefits.

[RyanKent]

In short, the content contained in iframes will not be indexed. It's a really bad idea from a SEO perspective. I use iframes when I intentionally am trying to keep certain content from being indexed.