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Some framed pages now showing the parent page title

seoogle

3:49 pm on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I have a client that insists on using frames. In spite of this I have been able to achieve good rankings and maintain a pretty easy to navigate/spider site by among other things, using javascript to reload stray pages back into their frameset. Up until recently Google has correctly used the title of the content page as the title for the page in the serps. Now I am noticing more and more pages in the results are converting over to using the title of the parent frame. As a result these pages are not performing as well as they used to and the title of the page in the serps is a bit misleading or not as appealing/relevant as it used to be for the user.

I have never had this problem before with Google or any other search engine and I am unsure what to do. I have again advised the client that it is time to loose the frames, but it is a large site and will be a huge task and take a lot of time to do so.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is this a new trend that will continue or a temporary glitch that will likely be corrected soon?

seoogle

5:35 pm on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I just did a google search for the term "this page uses frames" and from the results I can see I am not alone. I can't imagine why this would be desirable to Google. Pages and pages of results with titles like "
This page uses frames" etc... Whats up with this?

seoogle

2:26 pm on May 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Hmmm... I guess this site is the last on the internet to use frames... sure feels like it anyways.

rainborick

3:22 pm on May 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

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My first client insisted on keeping frames and so I've had to deal with this for several years now. Back then, there was little published advice, so I stuck to the basics. I put a mini-main-page in the <noframes> section of the <frameset> page, and installed some JavaScript that would automatically reload a <frame>d page back into the parent <frameset>. Between that and some strategic inbound linking to the most important interior pages, the site performed very well in Google, Yahoo!, and the old MSN. And despite the conventional wisdom about frames and search engines, the client site's primary category pages routinely ranked well and withstood many Google updates. But things have changed in Google in the past few months.

Google has always said that they would "sometimes" show the parent <frameset> page when a child <frame> is actually ranked, but my experience was that this rarely occurred. As I said, I have been having no real trouble getting <frame>d pages to appear in the SERPs. However, its happening more and more. I haven't really put any effort into the when and why of Google's methods here because as a practical matter its too costly in terms of click-throughs because the details of the <frameset> page that now appears in the SERPs are not a competitively close enough match for user queries to generate clicks. Put simply, its a traffic killer. We're redesigning the site.