I know frames are bad for SEO but...

I know frames are bad for SEO because you can't change the page titles, and all the different "pages" appear on the same url.

I can see those problems in the following 3 examples:

www.lotuscarclub.ca/lcc/index.html
http://www.oiw.ca
www.tone.ca

...but if I do a "site:" search in Google on those websites, Google seems to know about all their different pages, and has somehow found them on unique URLs:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q...nG=Search&meta= - 108 pages

http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Aoiw.ca&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a - 33 pages

http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Atone.ca&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a - 611 pages


How is that possible / how does that work? I don't see a link to a site map on any of those websites... Google found all the pages on unique URLs - why can't I find them?

Google found them, but those sites are still badly designed, aren't they?

Thanks.

Well I only looked at the first site (lotus car club) and its Google link.

I don't know what you mean? Its not in an IFRAME.
Its not even in a standard HTML frame.

You are right that both of these are bad for SEO.

Maybe you were looking at someother site using an IFRAME to view these sites?

Just go to the first site, click view source. You will see it is not in an iframe.

Oops, sorry - my bad. I'd included the wrong URL for the lotus car club website. It's fixed now. Any new thoughts?

I bought a framed site a while back and other people had figured out how to link directly to the files that were being displayed in the content window (probably with right mouse button). So, all of those pages were indexed. We unframed the site and traffic exploded.

I see now. Its a framed site as in standard HTML frames.

Whilst they are bad for SEO there is nothing to stop them being linked.
You often find the individual pages get indexed. This can happen without the navigation being present and is refered to as an Orphen page, just one of the reasons Frames are bad.

I guess I must be missing the point here, whats the problem?

Ah yes. Right click and "Open Link n a New tab" - that opens up the page on it's own unique URL and shows it's unique title.

That's pretty simple for me to do - shouldn't Google be able to figure that out on it's own too, without any external links to the individual pages?


Well, originally the problem was that I couldn't understand how Google could be indexing all those pages.

Now I have a different question: If I can access the unique page URLs and titles so easily (by right clicking), I expect Google can do the same thing, which is why it knows about all the pages. So then why are frames so bad?

Oh, I see one problem - when I open in a new tab, the navigation menu disappears because the its frame doesn't show up in the new tab. Is that the only problem?

Thats one of the problems - this is an Orphen page.

Its a pretty big problem though. Imagine someone reads your page, likes your product and wants to buyit, but they can't click on Shopping cart or buy now or contact us.
How hard do you think they are going to try and give you money before they click back and buy of someone else.

Its not the only problem though. The elements that make up a page - eg navigation feature quite heavily in how the page is ranked.

Frames are very bad for SEO and just bad. They are the dinosours of web design. There is nothing you can do with frames that you cant do by more modern and conventional methods.