On 23 Jul 98, Suzanne wrote:
> Or, would I put a link to some page like AboutTLC, which is the middle
> page of my frameset, then add a "home" link to the bottom of that page?
>
> My apologies if I'm unclear with my question. I'm not even sure what I'm
> asking :-)
Hmm... I've just been puzzling through this sort of question myself, and
I've arrived at what I *think* is the modus operandi here. I wouldn't
pledge my first-born as security on this one, mind.
(1) OK: the basic problem is that search engines do not usually follow
links that are accessed from inside framesets. So if your main page is
www.abc.com/index.html, which is simply a frameset leading to all the
other pages on the site, the engine will stop right there, cataloging the
entire site as consisting of one URL -- index.html -- that has essentially
no contents.
(2) The engines will, however, follow links and index content contained
inside <noframes>. In this way they are behaving like any non-frames
browser, ignoring all the frameset stuff and going direct to the <body>
material. (DIGRESSION: or the *implied* <body> material... I heard back
from someone at w3.org about this issue, and it seems that according to
the HTML 4.0 Frameset DTD, <noframes> must contain "BODY elements",
but the BODY *tags* themselves are optional.)
(3) So, you will want to have a link to some sort of "table of contents"
page(s) in the <noframes> section; i.e., a page that will stand on its own
outside a frameset, and which the engine can thus follow the rest of the
way in order to catalog your entire site.
(4) However, this being done, there is the problem of users entering your
site "in the middle", because the search engine has catalogued your
index.html as having basically no content, jumping instead to all the other
pages referenced in your table of contents page. So index.html won't
likely turn up high on a list of search hits.
(5) Therefore the "middle pages" should have a clear link to index.html, so
that users who jumped in part-way through can link back to the "proper"
framed starting page. (And the target for that link should be _top, by the
by.)
As for the advice from searchenginewatch.com to enclose <frameset>
inside <body> -- well, I dunno about that one. Doesn't make much
sense... a non-frames browser or spider should just ignore any tags it
doesn't understand (such as frameset, noframes, etc) and scan instead
for a <body> tag to indicate that content is about to follow. This should
work equally well *inside* <noframes> as out, or in fact better.
Anyone?
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte site: http://www.almonte.com/
Business site: http://www.federalweb.com
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