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Search Friendly Programming and Design



Using IFrames

Using iframes on a website is not something that should be done if the website is designed to be user and spider friendly. The content of iframes is not generally accessible by SE crawlers and screen readers and causes the same issues as frames do, where the links intended to open in the iframe get crawled and indexed and will then be opening out of "context" with the problems of no links to the rest of the site unless on the page unless links are added to the page to open the parent page or the main site.
Added to this is the need to have the page to be opened in the iframe as a correctly formatted HTML document. The reason for this is that iframes become an independant entity in the main page and there is no inheritance of styles or scripts between the parent page and the iframe.
This can of course be used to an advantage in some cases. If the site is showing pages from external sites, maybe as previews. It would make sense not to allow the search engines to index these pages and have the content appear as if it came from the displaying page rather than the parent site.

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