Frames can cause poor rankings

Some people love frames whilst others hate them.  However Frames are well known to cause most search engines problems as some cannot read them and most cannot follow the links which means that most of your pages will not get listed.

Even if the search engine does index your page the navigation bar of your site will be lost which means that your poor visitor will not be able to find his way around your site.

However, there are ways around this so that you can have easy navigation using frames and still make your site search engine friendly.

The <no frames> tag

By using this tag in a specific way it is possible to make the <frameset> page search engine friendly.  First off al you should be aware that the text contained within the <no frames> tag cannot be seen by your visitors unless they view the code manually.  However it is advised that the <no frames> text DOES have text that is relevant to the site in case it is spot checked by a human to see if you are spamming.  Also ensure that these <no frames> tags are varied as search engines like Alta Vista are on the lookout for templates  and will remove them.

The best advice is to repeat your index page within the <no frames> tag and also include a list of links to the other pages for the search engines to spider.

Information pages

As well as using the <no frames> tag as outlined above you should ideally create a new entry page which does not use frames like www.nohiding.com have done.

This has other advantages in that the new entry page can be specifically optimised for your key phrases.

And finally submit each of your pages separately and include links on every page to return to the main frameset.  However, make sure you do not submit these pages all at once but say one a day to avoid spamming the search engines