Do Frames Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Almost
all SEO's agree that using frames will have devasting results
on your search engine rankings. Is it true? We decided to answer
this extremely simple question for the two leading search engines
using a simple statistical analysis.
The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries
that were naturally performed last month by myself and three associates
using the two leading search engines and analyzed them. I had to visit
each page and check the HTML source code to see if frames were in use.
I counted the number of pages found that utilized frames
for the first 8 rankings. The results for each of the two leading search
engines were kept separate so that we could discover any differences
between the two leading search engines for this factor.
The resulting graphs show the number of pages utilizing frames
for each ranking. The Y-axis shows the number of pages found utilizing
frames, while the X-axis shows rankings 1 through 8. Here are
the graphs for each of the two leading search engines:
(Note
to webmasters: You have permission to hotlink, text link or even
copy the above images to your own site. And you have permission
to remove this note. :)
The
result is very conclusive and very surprising. Frames had no effect
on ranking with both of the leading search engines! The SEO gurus
are wrong again!
Notes:
1.
There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords.
I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself
and three associates during the month.
Conclusion:
Pages
which utilize frames rank no higher nor lower than pages that
do not utilize frames on both of the leading search engines.
This
is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that these search
engines do, in fact, rank pages with frames the same as pages
without frames in the study.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
