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Search Tip:
Use the NOFRAMES Tag
by Christine Churchill
Keynote NetMechanic
If your page uses frames, be sure to include a NOFRAMES section on your page. Though this tag may not make much difference in the way your page looks, it can help you get listed with the major search engines.
What's a gateway page? It's a page specifically designed for submission to a search engine. The page is tuned with a specific set of keywords, boosting the chance that these keywords will be given a heavy weight.
The NOFRAMES tag was invented by Netscape for backward compatibility with browsers that didn't support the FRAME and FRAMESET tags. The tag was needed because the syntax of the FRAMESET tag fundamentally changed the structure of an HTML document, causing problems for browsers that didn't understand the tag.
Figure 1-a shows the normal structure of an HTML document; Figure 1-b shows the structure of a document using frames. Notice that the FRAMESET tag takes the place of the BODY tag in the document.
Since the FRAMESET tag replaces the BODY, older browsers aren't able to find the body of the page. As a result, if you view a frames page with one of these older browsers, you'll see a blank page.
This can be corrected by adding a NOFRAMES section to the page, as shown below.
<FRAMESET COLS="25%,*">
<FRAME SRC="nav.html">
<FRAME SRC="display.html">
</FRAMESET>
<NOFRAMES>
Alternate HTMLgoes
here...
</NOFRAMES>
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The old browsers will ignore the FRAMESET and FRAME tags, but show all the HTML included in the NOFRAMES section. Newer browsers are likewise built to ignore the NOFRAMES section and display the frames.
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A search engine spider is really just an automated Web browser. |
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Netscape introduced frames in Version 2.0 of Navigator; Internet Explorer has supported frames since Version 3.0. In today's market, that means that less than 5% of browsers don't support frames.
If that's true, why bother with the NOFRAMES tag? Because, while most browsers have moved to support them, many search engine spiders still don't support frames. A search engine spider is really just an automated Web browser. Like Web browsers, these spiders sometimes lag behind in their support for new HTML tags.
Lack of support for frames can keep those engines from spidering your site. When you submit your page to these search engines, the spider will index the page containing the FRAMESET tag, but not follow the links to the individual frames.
Which search engines suffer from this problem? According to Search Engine Watch, these search engines don't support frames:
- Excite
- HotBot
- Infoseek
- WebCrawler
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Only AltaVista and Northern Light fully support frames (Lycos has limited support for frames).
So even if you don't consider the NOFRAMES important to the way your page looks, use it to improve your visibility in the search engines.
Of course, another way around this problem is to submit the individual frame pages to the engine, instead of just submitting the FRAMESET page. This way you can ensure that the real content of your site is indexed.
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