IFrames and Thin Content Worries

[SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing]

Hi everyone,

I've read a lot about the impact of iFrames on SEO lately -- articles like http://www.visibilitymagazine.com/how-do-iframes-affect-your-seo/ for example.

I understand that iFrames don't cause duplicate content or cloaked content issues, but what about thin content concerns?

Here's my scenario:

Our partner marketing team would like to use an iframe to pull content detailing how Partner A and my company collaborate from a portal the partners have access to. This would allow the partners to help manage their presence on our site directly.

The end result would be that Partner A's portal content would be added to Partner A's page on our website via an iFrame. This would happen about across at least 100 URLs.

Currently we have traditional partner pages, with unique HTML content. There's a little standalone value for queries involving the bigger partners' names + use case terms, but only in less than 10% of cases. So I'm concerned about those pages, but I'm more worried about the domain overall.

My main concern is that in the eyes of Google I'd be stripping a lot of content off the domain all at once, and then replacing it with these shell pages containing nothing (in terms of SEO) but meta, a headline, navigation links, and an iFrame.

If that's the case, would Google view those URLs as having thin content? And could that potentially impact the whole domain negatively? Or would Google understand that the page doesn't have content because of the iFrames and give us a pass?

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Andrew

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Andrew,

Re. your comment:

My main concern is that in the eyes of Google I'd be stripping a lot of content off the domain all at once, and then replacing it with these shell pages containing nothing (in terms of SEO) but meta, a headline, navigation links, and an iFrame.

... you are right to be concerned about this. It is going to look, as you say, like a very thin page with no value-add for anyone visiting, or Google.

If the pages served no real purpose to Google, you could always robots them out, but what is being suggested isn't a particularly good idea if you are still wanting them to rank in the SERPs.

-Andy