Search Engines and Frames

[Tannin]

Last night The Prof asked why his Google search came up with a #1 listing for a site that started out: "your browser can't display frames, upgrade to a frames-capable browser". Seeing as he's running IE 6.0, why is it so, he asked.

Essentially, because the Google search engine (I assume) goes looking for the top-level pages first, and it's pretty standard practice for a top level page to have a browser frames ability check, so that it can then hand you off to an appropriate set of sub-pages. In other words, you were just seeing what Google saw, Prof. Go to the site itself and your frames-capable browser will be redirected to a different page.

Was that the question you asked? Or is my memory playing me false?

 

[Prof.Wizard]

Thanks.

I have a slightly different theory. Since a frame-based view of a site is essentially: different web pages opened in different frames, I presumed Google CAN'T see those different pages, although they all belong to O&O's homepage.

For example: If O&O's homepage is made of two frames, each www.oosoft.com/index.html and www.oosoft.com/buttons.html, Google is unable to see the buttons.html of the left frame and the snapshot is taken only for the index.html page. Of course, a script there is activated prompting the browser (in this case Google's engine) that this is not the exact homepage cause there is an inability to show the other frame...

Works? :roll:

 

[James]

I believe that the Google spider must identify itself as such in the User-Agent field of the HTTP request (this is important to maintain accurate site usage stats, so that search engine spiders aren't counted as visitors). If a page does a test and asks the spider what browser it is, it gets a response which it won't recognise, and some code assumes this means the Google spider is not capable of displaying frames - hence the error message.