Over at an article about Ads on GoDaddy Free Hosting we were asked:

… do you think ifreames effect the indexing of other pages on the site?

While a bot is crawling the page will it see the iframe first and fucking on viagra crawl to it rather then crawl the rest of the page? More over, won’t this be harmful on large scale sites while trying to index inner pages?

Please any one let us know your thoughts … 🙂

Although I have not had any experience with iFrames on a site containing real content (I have used iFrames to display advertisements, but that’s about it) I got busy doing a bit of research and found that iFrames may not be indexed and displayed in the Google Search Results.

You can read what Google says about here below:

IFrames are sometimes used to display content on web pages. Content displayed via iFrames may not be indexed and available to appear in Google’s search results. We recommend that you avoid the use of iFrames to display content. If you do include iFrames, make sure to provide additional text-based links to the content they display, so that Googlebot can crawl and index this content.

That content is part of the the free help that Google offers to webmasters at their Webmaster Help Centre. You can read that answer, and more about using rich media files on your web-site here.

3 Replies to “Does Google Index the Content in iFrames?”

  1. I have a Blog with a godaddy free hosting. I use the Google/Yahoo and LiveSearch webmaster tools and none of them report any crawl errors, they haven’t even acknowledged the iFrame.

  2. If you are ever wondering what will or will not get indexed by a search engine, just imagine that you are a blind Internet user (yes, they do exist). Indexers are, after all, quite blind. Therefore, if your site is standards complaint and easily accessible to those with visual impairments, then you are indexer friendly.

    If you want to see what your site looks like to the indexer, and have ether OSX or Linux, open up your terminal, and type “w3m http://mysite.com” and press enter. w3m is a command line web browser. Since it is text only, it closely emulates what a indexer can “see.”

  3. I ended up on this page because I was befuddled that a page consisting of a blog, nested in an iFrame is not only a top page for a client site, but in Google’s top ten for that search term.

    I was pretty much under the impression that what is ststed above by Google was gospel. However, much of what I know I learned by being observant. There is copious linkage, via a sidenav on the blog – but that is within the iFrame tags. Go Figger!

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