I thought frame and iframe were bad for SEO, but today I was doing a search for "numismatica" on Google.it. The 3rd site is lemonete.com which is all made with frames. A competitor site (nummus.com) that has no frames ranks much lower when searching for the same word: "numismatica".
So can we use frames without taking an SEO hit now?
Any explanation (possibly simple) would be appreciated also about the fact the 2nd site ranks much lower. :)
Just because the site with Frames outranks the site without frames doesn't means that frames aren't harmful. The site with the frames may simply rank well despite the frames. The frames may be hurting them but thanks to quality incoming links and/or poor SEO on the other site they rank higher.
Frames are still bad for accessibility and there is rarely, if ever, a good time to use them. Even if they no longer negatively affect SEO it doesn't make them ok to use.
According to this article,
The content in an iframe is not considered part of the parent page.
Seems like that would be pretty bad for SEO purposes.
I think there is a misunderstanding about frames affect SEO that I've heard from a lot of people. There is no inherent penalty for having iframes on your site, as there are several legitimate uses for them. There are iframes in GMail for example. but as tnorthcutt said, The content of an iframe isn't part of the parent page and isn't going to be indexed as such (if at all), so that could be problematic.
Also, there are a lot of factors that go into search rankings, which is why you can't say that one site should be ranked over another because of just one of them.
There is no SEO penalty for having frames... framed pages are just pages! Only the frame page itself is different... you usually only have one if using frames or a few with iframes.
At one time (early 90's) some search engines could not follow framed pages. Browsers have supported frames since IE3 and Netscrape 2. Search engines have followed frames for well over 10 years now! People read stuff on the web written sometime ago and rewrite it and another will read that and rewrite it again... on and on... net fiction! If used in an iframe or a frame it is still a page and crawlers find them and index them.
Framed pages do need some extra coding, noframes tag and javascript to open page inside of the complete site. Only the noframes tag has any bearing on SEO.
Frames have some SEO benefits also as there are usually more pages. I have also had good results with frame forwarding... the only way to safely forward a site without a 301 and still use it for keyword searches.
From my experience the only thing you can count on is that they will index the page that is held in the frame. These are just the same as any other pages they may index and will get the same ranking as any other page on your site. There is nothing on a page held in a frame that is different! Using the noframes tag has an effect on one page only the frameset page, and is used to add content that the search bots will read on that page only. I use a bookmark button with a script on each framed page so the backlinks are not a problem. Using frames in regards to SEO may not be for amateurs as there are some tricks to it but these are old tricks (javascript, noframes) well known and easy to use by the pros. If you don't know what you are doing... don't use frames! However there is NO penalty for using frames.