May 19
How search engines treat iframes?
This question arose in my mind after I designed the embed code of my Google Analytics Widgets based on inline frames. The iframe based design was more comfortable because I could keep the widget’s dimension under my control without depending on the embed code. Rather, I can do anything within the frame’s source page like adding dynamic hyperlinks.
My big mistake here was that I wrongly guessed that search engines treat these hyperlinks as back links as the iframe is embedded on another site. But what I saw was that the search engines treated the links to my page from within iframe tags worser than the nofollow links. I didn’t find any back links in Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site explorer. Next, Ravi gave a feedback that iframe in the embed code made him wary.
Finally, I decided to break the embed code into plain HTML without any iframe in it. Now, to the crawler’s view the embedded widget code appears as if it is originating from the same site and the links in the embedded code have now become back links. This also gives an an option to the user to remove the back links, if he/she doesn’t want to add credits to the widget creator.
Compare the two embed codes yourself,
iframe based embed code :
<iframe src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/GAEmbedImage.aspx?wid=07d59e9b-f1aa-4511-a0a6-b66b4e7a08a6&vars=%26daterange%3d1%26from%3d%26to%3d%26subreport%3d3%26sparkline%3dPageviewsSparkline%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26width%3d200%26height%3d200&width=200&height=200'></iframe>
Plain search engine friendly embed code :
<a style='text-decoration : none;' href='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/' target='_blank'><img style='border: 0px none;' alt='Loading…' src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/HitCounter.aspx?wid=7b2bc7bf-17b1-41c3-968b-6b66499a6f7c&vars=%26subreport%3d3%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26since%3d20070101' title='Google Analytics Widgets' title='Hit counter powered by Google Analytics'></img></a>
But I’m yet to find out how search engines treat iframes? Do they index the frame sources as well? And if they do so, do they treat the links on the source pages as back links?
Chat
May 19th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Read TimM’s message at http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/5708.htm
Even if you succeed 2 get backlinks it won’t help u much in improving ur rank. Search engines tend to give less value 2 same kind of links from all the pages of site from differet sites. So, ur widget links, blogroll links may not help much. Nowadays they look for context based link. say, if some high profile blogger writes a blog post about your tools and linking to you it has more value
P.s- in the link u gave me u need to fix .com into .net . Thanks
May 20th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Ravi, fixed the link