I like to think of iFrames as little windows on websites that content peaks through. It’s not really on the page, but is being displayed to the user as an element of that page and more often than not, blends seamlessly into the surrounding design.
From your browser it can be difficult to determine if content is on-page or is being displayed through an iFrame, but from an SEO or search engine perspective, it is oh-so-evident.
Two iFrame Scenarios: Your Domain and Theirs
As an SEO, under most conditions I would recommend that my clients NOT use iFrames to display text/content on their pages. In the end, unless there are very specific circumstances, having on-page content is the most beneficial to the website in terms of search engine optimization.
But what does it really mean for SEO? There are a two scenarios I would like to discuss here. First of all, when the content displayed in the iFrame is from another site/domain. And secondly, when the content is from the same domain, but a different file.
When the Content is Theirs
This one’s pretty simple. When the content displayed on your site through an iFrame is from another domain, your site does not benefit from this content. Even though it’s being displayed on your pages, it still is being pulled from another source and does not live on your domain. I’ve seen this happen when a company’s blog is being hosted on another domain and is being pulled to the main domain through an iFrame. Even though the content is unique and exclusive to that company, their site is not benefiting from the frequently updated and content-rich resource.
When the Content is Yours
A not so simple situation is when the content being displayed is hosted on the main domain, but is being pulled to the pages through an iFrame. If the source URL is a spiderable URL, the crawlers can follow the path and spider the content on the page feeding the iFrame. It’s good that this content is actually on your domain, but the problem is, it’s not actually being attributed to the page it’s being displayed on.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce site and your CMS dynamically displays product listings on category pages through an iFrame, you can run into some problems with making these category pages optimized and relevant for the products you’re promoting. Because it’s likely that you’re optimizing your category pages with unique title and meta tags, this top level page is missing the benefit of the product listings, and you’re left with an optimized shell – without content.
It can also hurt your internal linking because the page that contains the listings, content, or whatever is showing through your iFrame is free of any navigational elements to help the spiders continue crawling your site. Basically, once they enter the iFrame page, web crawlers are not able to fluidly crawl through additional site links.
To Summarize
In the end, it’s really best to include content on-page when it is supposed to be part of that page. It doesn’t do your site any good to have content displayed on your pages, but hosted on another domain, and it stifles optimization and spiderability when iFrames are used to display windows of text from other URLs on your own site.
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What if you’re Company A that provides the “content” that would be placed via an iframe on many other websites (Comapanies B – ZZZ), which will have a dedicated page on each of those sites specifically for hosting the iframe in which Company A will deliver content (and a powered by backlink outside of the iframe on the dedicated page). Is it best to design some minimal navigation for the content that will load within the iframe, as it will get spidered, and those additional links will lead back to Company A site? Plus, should the iframed content get indexed, there would be some basic level of navigation for those entering from a search?
Thanks for the great questions, CuriouSEO. I’ll start by explaining how I am referring to iFrames in this post. An example of an iFrame coding may be like the following:
<iframe name=”CompanyA” src=”http://www.companyA.com/page1.htm” width=”500″ height=”280″ frameborder=”1″ >
The search engine will be able to follow the link within the src=, thus leading it directly to Company A’s site. So, from an SEO perspective, using additional coding and navigation won’t make much difference as the search engine will be following that link directly to page1.htm on Company A’s website.
From a usability perspective, having the additional links/navigation from Company A’s site display on sites B-ZZZ could help the user interact with the content within the iFrame more successfully. It likely depends on the purpose of the frame.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Thanks for the advice. I’ve seen quite a few sites lately drop out of Google when the site was redeveloped using iframes. Now I know why and why there is no way I would very use iframes.
Good advice. I’ve run into this issue in the past with a client, an affiliate marketer, who was using an iframe to display an affiliate link. They came to me asking why they were nowhere to be found in the search engines. No content= no indexing.
Hi,
Your SEO & iFrames piece came up the first thing in Google for my search, “iframes and seo”. What’s more, it was EXACTLY the piece of info I needed. This date, Jan 2010, I’m working on a much needed major monster total revision rewrite of my Newslt.com website. I was thinking that as a final sprucey-goosey, that I’d toss in pertinent Google Blog pages as a way for folks to comment. Purely for SEO, really.
I suspected dirty work afoot, and that’s why I came looking…and found your excellent verbiage the first thing out of the box!!! So, I guess if I still take time to create unique blog urls for all the jillion or so pages…I’ll just link to them the old fashioned way and be done with it. None of this inline frame business. What’d be the point? At least when I finish I’ll have some extra linkbacks…such as they are. Thanks for the stuff I needed when I needed it!!!
Norm
Not real sure if anyone is watching this post anymore but am attempting to better manage Banner Ads and Text links on about 1,100 wordpress sites and looking for an easier way to display not only Banner ads but also Text links. I don’t care about engines seeing the banners but wonder if they see the Text links and count them as a link to the target or just all 1,100 being 1 value or 1,100 link value.
My thought was iFrames since for the life of me i can’t find a clear answer on a RSS feed doing what i need.
In the past i’ve used Banner Graphic hosted in 1 place and a forward for the click, but this didn’t allow me to add/edit text links, just banners.
Any suggestions on managing this monster would be great!
Thanks
Hi Don,
If you are trying to pass relevancy from the text links to the destination URLs, iFrames would not be the best option. If the links are embedded on an indexable page, the can be followed, and there is a good chance that the engines will find them. However, the link to destination would be attributed to the iFrame page, not the page it is embedded on. So, a page with nothing but a large list of links is not going to pass much relevancy. Especially considering that the links may not all be topical to destination page.
If you are not worried about passing relevancy, and are just looking for an easy way to manage these links, an iFrame would do the trick.
However, if you are looking to get value passed, I would suggest writing a script to pull specific elements into a page. This way you can still manage them all in one spot and just set rules for what links to pull on to a page.
I hope that helps.