No one answered my SEO post question :-(

I posted a question which I thought was a rather simple one, but I am saddened that no one answered it, so I will try one more time. I have a client who has invested heavily into two web sites for two hotels he owns. The problem is that both sites use framsets extensively. So much so, that there is only one frame used for each site repsectively. The only keywords that are visible are those that are in the frameset itself, none of the text in the various pages appears anywhere in the source code. I am advising him that the site should eradicated of all framesets to begin the SEO process. Is this not correct? His webmasters tell him that they can achieve the same results of SEO as the site is not laid out. The sites are www derkleineprinz de and www hotelbelleepoque de Please help us.

Spiders hate sites using frames. Some of them do now spider the sites, but I've never seen a frames site get high up for commercial terms.

One problem with using frames is the searchers will go straight to the page with the content on, so if you're using frames to load in the navigation then they won't be able to see it and won't look at anything else on your site. Similarly, unless the spiders can find that navigation page, they won't be able to find the rest of the pages on your site.

Both sites are using PHP so you can easily use PHP includes to bring the navigation / static elements in to each page, meaning you won't need the frames and the spiders will easily be able to reach all of your pages.

NB: on your frameset page you have the code:

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">

As this is telling the spiders not to follow links on your page, how do you expect them to find the other pages on your site?

Good to see the site is using the <noframes> system to show some content, shame it's just there to tell you to use a different browser - I'm sure people using screen readers will be delighted to nip out and upgrade their eyes. If you had some meaningful content in there the spiders could have latched on to that - e.g. links to all of your most useful pages and some text that's a copy of what's shown on the home page, and you'd be helping out people with older equipment or systems that can't load frames.

Get rid of frames, use divs or includes.

Yep, Google actually treats framesets worse now than it did a year or two ago. Nowadays even the noframe area is hardly weighted at all and the links in the noframe area are not followed (various tests have proven this). Break out of frames and use CSS is the advice I would give. There are a bunch of usability issues as well as to why you shouldnt use frames (bookmarking for starters). It is increasingly rare to see frameset sites in the top 10. Those that do make it, are relying virtually solely on off page criteria (backward links). Most of the time frames are simply not necessary.

Alan

Google sees framesets as link to the pages in the frameset.

i.e. a frameset with top.html and page.html will be spidered as that.

There is no content for Google to spider, no keywords and no anchor text...

I agree with Webby regarding the <noframes> tag, I have a feeling this is the same for <noscript> tags as well, as these are used a bit for spamming.

I cant see why the point of frames are, many sites do this i think as they dont have PR on other pages so they have a PR5 (or simular) on the homepage (frameset page) and every other page navigated through the frameset would still appear to be PR5.

Dan

I agree, thye fist step of any SEO process is to have a spider friendly structure. Frames must go.

The client should not balk too much at this... the big investment in most sites is the design and the content. Just slap it onto good html pages. Tell him it is a tuition expense.

Hi Thall, if your client is German tell him to read my framset tutorial here...
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/Suchmaschinenoptimierung/coding-3.htm
and
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/Suchmaschinenoptimierung/design2.htm

Some basic info frameset optimization there and lots of about why not to use them :-)
Alan