I’ve read recently that web crawlers/spiders/robots do not handle frames very well, but i’ve also heard that frames can be optimized to make them crawler/spider/robot friendly. Does anyone know how to do this? ?
@JPnycDec 29.2005 — #1 way would be to link directly to the document that's in the frame, and then hide the link from humans with CSS. Bots will still see it because it's in the source code, and will follow it. So basically, you're breaking frames just for the bots. And any pages you do that with should also link back to the main page.
@15hoursNowauthorDec 29.2005 — #well, the page has 3 frames, it has a frame on the left for the menu, a frame on the top for the banner, and then a target frame for the menu links to popup in and all of them sit inside the index.html. So would I put a link to each frame in the index.html and a link back to index.html in each frame? And also, would I need to link each menu link page that pops up in the target frame back to index.html?
@JPnycDec 29.2005 — #Well you don't have to worry about the banner frame. Have you considered using serverside includes instead of frames? That would solve all your problems.
@JPnycDec 29.2005 — #Well basically it's a means of including one file in another, without use of frames. So you get the benefits of frames in that you would have 1 file to change for your nav, etc, yet it appears on every page. [url=http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html]Here's[/url] a tutorial on it.
@15hoursNowauthorDec 29.2005 — #hey, thanks for the info. Not sure if our webserver is setup to handle SSI or not, I sent an email to our host to see if it is or not, havent heard back yet.