Separate URL vs iFrame

[AliMac26]

Hi Everyone,

I'm not a designer/developer and am an not extremely knowledgeable in SEO, but I'll try to be as clear as I can. One of the designers here is creating a recipe section on our website. He created it so that it's a container (or iFrame?) on the page. Basically, no matter what you click (different sections and recipes) the URL stays the same. I was told to find out from an SEO perspective if it's better to do things this way or have a separate URL for each section and recipe.

It's been brought up that from a social/sharing standpoint separate URLs would be better so people can send a link directly to the specific recipe they want to share.

Any thoughts/comments are appreciated! Thanks for the help!

[ThompsonPaul]

You worded your question just fine, Ali.

You have to have separate URLs for each recipe. For usability, for social sharability as you mentioned, and for SEO. (Otherwise that poor single page is going to have to try to rank for all the different terms of all the different recipes. Hopeless.)

Also. make certain that schema markup for recipes has been properly applied to each recipe. That way if/when the recipes start to rank, they will show the recipe snippets in the SERPS, attracting more attention and clicks.

[edited to add - you'll also want to be sure you have a search and categorisation method (called a taxonomy) so that your visitors can quickly find the types of recipes they're looking for, instead of having to randomly scroll through a bunch of pages to find something they like. Something else that would be impossible with the current one-huge-bucket approach]

Hope that helps?

Paul

[AliMac26]

Hi Paul,

Thank you so much for replying. I don't think they're as concerned about ranking for the recipes as they were about doing something that would be harmful to SEO (as far as adding so many extra pages/URLs to the site). It's a hunting gear website so the chances of ranking for recipes are probably extremely low I totally agree with you that from a social sharing standpoint it is necessary.

Thank you so much for the taxonomy/search tip also. That's a great idea!