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I am the webmaster for www.example.com
We have a site that runs in frames. The top menu, a side menu and the main contents frame. Whereas the top and side menus remain static, the main contents frame changes depending upon what links the user clicks.
Google, Yahoo and MSN have all listed pages appearing in the main contents frame. We have a small javascript that forces these pages to open up along with the top and side menu frames.
for this effect, lets say a link
http://www.example.com/buynew/new.asp
gets converted to
http://www.example.com/index2.asp?pagename=/buynew/new.asp
Not long ago, after I submitted a sitemap to google, we had a pagecount of over 360000 pages indexed by google. However, today it has diminished to less than 25000.
I need your help and advise. Do you feel the javascript redirecting to a new url is the culprit? Is there another way of forcing frames without redirecting?
Thanks a lot in advance.
Nilesh Deshpande
[edited by: pageoneresults at 12:32 pm (utc) on Aug. 22, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit] [/edit][/1]
Even if the visitor sees one page consisting of 3 frames - the search engine will probably only see your frameset file. If you have a link to the main page included in the frameset, the spider can find the file, but might still not be able to see your menu links file. So you end up with some, but not all of the main page files being indexed. If the spider can't find your menu file, how will it know where the other main page files are? Also, the header, title and meta tag info are probably the same for each page, which may also be a problem. The title (at least!) should be different on every page.
The spiders can't (generally) read javascript. So having a redirect that helps move human visitors to the right page won't really help the spiders navigate the site.
At the same time, if your links contain javascript, they may not be passing PageRank along your file structure.
You may want to consider either:
1. Redesigning the site to not use frames
2. At the very, very minimum: making a flat html sitemap and linking to it from an indexed page.
On a side note, do you actually have 360,000 unique pages? Or are they mostly pages that have been indexed multiple times?
In particular, rankings for interior pages beyond the home page increased the most. Google seems willing to send traffic to a lot more pages when frames are removed. Another benefit is that your visitors can bookmark individual pages, and other websites can give links to a lot more pages, broadening the overall strength of your inlinks.
Use some sort of templates in structuring your new pages so they are still easy to update all at once.
Yes we do have more than 400000 unique pages on our site. We have been building these since 1999.
I am taking up the excercise of moving out of frames. I suppose this is easier said than done.
Thanks a lot again.
Nilesh Deshpande
