Iframes and Gooogle

[Lebron27]

I am doing some SEO work for client that has a restaurant reservation plugin with a review website connected to it, they handle reservations through an iframe plugin on all pages of the restaurants that are connected to it.

Can I place a link in the iframe and get Google to index it? Would be nice.

Google is indexing the iframes when you look for certain very longtail keywords. Google displays a page where only the iframe is displayed, this is not relevant for the user and I would like to remove it. But I prefer links and indexed iframes over no links and no indexed iframes on longtail keywords.

[RobertFisher]

Overboslaan

I am going to purposefully not get into what does or does not get indexed with an iFrame and just say it is not IMO a best practice. (Ok, yes Google will index a link in an iFrame...typically that is attributed to the source of the iFrame and not to the site it resides on. Again, whatever anyone believes about iFrames is true....)

With your question, my concern would be that the reviews are tied to the reservations plugin. If, your reviews are set up with structured data, are your reviews showing up when someone searches on the restaurant? Or, do they only show up if I happen to see the reservations page in the serp? With the change to the carousel in local for restaurants, I have to believe that review snippets are ever more important.

Hope this helps.

[kchandler]

Quick question, do you have control over the iframed content?

[Lebron27]

Yes I have the control over it, because it is our own iframe

[Lebron27]

The Iframe is a plugin where people can make a reservation.

I think it is relevant to place a link in the frame where people can read reviews from the people that have visited this restaurant.

[kchandler]

Since you have control over it you have a few options to help give the best experience for end users. The first update would be adding the following META tag to your iframe  section:

This will allow search engines to crawl the page, follow the links and pass authority BUT keep from indexing them in the search engines. From there if each page is only being framed in on one page you could also include a canonical tag to pass the authority to the higher level page that would be better for end users. However, if it is framed into multiple different pages that approach probably wouldn't not work.

Let me know if that makes sense or if i miss understood your question, thanks!

• Kyle

[Lebron27]

Thnx Kyle, I figured that we should add the noindex, follow tag. It is nice to see that you agree on it.

I am still wondering if it is normal to add a link to the frame and get that link indexed, it would be awesome. It would be a relevant link because the user can find reviews of the restaurant it wants to book a table for.

Is there any way to test how much Google can read from my Iframe?

[kchandler]

Well if you know that the frame is already indexed you can do a site search of the frame and see what it looks like as well as the last cached date. The query would look something like this:

site:example.com/iframe-page.html

This will give you the page that Google has indexed. If you are going have the pages not be indexed i really so no SEO value into adding a hyperlink pointing to the frame itself (why build its authority if it is not in the SERPS?). So i would really just take into account the end users experience. If they can already see the framed content, why have a link that just shows it again?

If you are able to share some URLs i might be able to give some more specific answers, thanks!

• Kyle