Hi, I recently changed the homepage for my web site (runs on Apache), and used frames to divide the page into a navigation bar and the site. However, now Google's crawler does not see the site anymore. If I browse the cached version of the site, I see a blank page. Additionally, since it does not see the index page anymore, I had it set to follow the index page for indexing, so it no longer indexes any other pages. I've heard Google is incompatible with frames, is this true? If so, is there a workaround?

Well, personally I think frames are a very poor implementation choice. You can always get the same effect using DIVs. But, I am assuming you are using frames because you are using static HTML pages as opposed to pages created server-side (i.e. PHP, ASP, etc) and you don't want to have to re-code the menus and other content that does not change on each and every page.

I would say if you can, use a server-side solution and create the menu's once and include them on each page where appropriate.

If that is not an option then see if your server supports server-side includes. you can use these with regular HTML files. Then you can create a single file for your menu and include it in each page.

If that is not an option or you really want to use frames I can think of one possibility (I have not tested these).

Have all your links point to the "content" files and not the frame page. Then use javascript to make the page load into frames (do a search for "javascript force frames"). I would think that google spiders would not process the Javascript and would instead index the content page. Of course this means any visitors w/o JavaScript enabled wil have problems.

Basically, frames suck!

Michael J

Quoted from Google Webmaster Guidelines

"Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."

jpw

My advice is to avoid using frames. Like what Michael explained, use DIV tags instead. You'll get better SEO with that.

anmjoven