Client wants to distribute web content to dealers - iFrame?
-
I have a client who sells a product through a network of nationwide dealers. He wants to provide update-able content to these dealers so they can create sections on their websites dedicated to the product. For ex., www.dealer.com/product_XYZ. The client is thinking he'd like to provide an iframe solution to the dealers, so he can independently update the content that appears on their sites.
I know iFrames are old, but are there any SEO concerns I should know about? Another option is to distribute content via HTML that has a rel=canonical command as part of the code, but then he loses the ability to centrally update all the distributed content.
Are there other solutions he should consider?
Thanks --
-
Hi Keith,
I think it really depends how much you want to invest in technology and how much controll you have over the dealer websites.
Wish I had a better answer for you or more data to go on. There's been a test or two over the years that Google follows links through iFrames, but so little research has been done in this area it's almost impossible to give solid advice.
Typically SEOs avoid any sort of iframe because it's really not the best way to code content on your own site, but this seems to be a different situation. If controlling the content is important, in my opinion I don't see a huge problem using frames, but it's something you'd want to keep your eye on. My gut tells me everything should be fine, but if Google suddenly sees 100's of new frames all pointing to the same content, this might start to look a little strange.
I agree that the cross domain rel=canonical would be a nightmare in regards to keeping things consistent, and likely hard to implement.
Another option would be to use something like XML feeds, but my guess is this might be more technical investment than is warranted.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What the hell that iframe is doing?
I have a competitor using a technique I don't understand. But which seems to work. Basically in the homepage has a <noscript>area with a bunch of internal links to pages like:</p> <ul> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword1">keyword1</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword2">keyword2</a></li> <li><a href="foo.com/keyword3">keyword3</a></li> </ul> <p>Inside these pages there's an iframe with the site homepage url as source, within the iframe tag there's some text (less than 100 words) with some emphasis on the keyword and a link back to the home using keyword as anchor text.</p> <p>All the pages are in the sitemap and indexed, and when you open one you are shown that page (no 301 redirect).</p> <p>Technically those are not doorway pages, because there's no 301.</p> <p>The website has a much weaker backlink profile than others, but does rank pretty well with better positions for those keywords, for many is the TOP 1 (with the url of the homepage, not the iframed pages).</p> <p>And I don't understand why. I understand the usage of the iframe to have the same content as the home page, but without being detect as duplicate content.</p> <p>And I can guess google crawler does crawl the <noscript> links follow them and.... And since the page is basically empty should not do much. The url of the page with the iframe includes the keyword, but doesn't sounds like such a powerful signal to be sent back the homepage thanks to that link contained within the iframe tags.</p> <p><strong>Does anyone have any idea why it works?</strong></p></noscript>
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
Content not being spidered
I've got a site with some serious content issues. The builder of the template doesn't understand what I'm asking (they're confusing spidering with indexing). If the page is run through a spider simulator (web confs won't work on this site for some reason) it shows the content is not being seen by Google. The template is Momentum and on Joomla. Most other sites I've found on the web have a similar issue. Basically it's reading the text in the header and footer, but nothing in the body. Any thoughts? www.rocksolidroof.com
Technical SEO | | GregWalt0 -
Content is king, is it okay if its in a widget?
My home page for my site, isn't really a home page, not sure how to describe that. We have additional pages that are stand alone pages which we work on and add content too, just not for the main page. So I have put my 300 words in a widget on the front page (which actually shows up on all the page being a widget. Is that good for SEO, or should it be in the body of a page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Duplicate Content Errror
I am getting a duplicate content error for urls for the "tags" or categories pages for my blog. These are some the URLs that SEOmoz is saying are errors, or duplicate pages. http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=Facebook http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=content+marketing http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=inbound+marketing As you can see, they are just the pages that are aggregating certain blog post based on how we tagged them with the appropriate category. Is this really a problem for our SEO, if so any suggestions on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | TalkingSheep0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0 -
Does google recognize original content when affiliates use xml-feeds of this content
Hi, Concerning the upcoming (We're from the Netherlands) Panda release: -Could the fact that our affiliates use XML-feeds of our content effect our rankings in some way -Is it possible to indicate to google that content is yours? Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek [email protected] | ACSI publishing | www.suncamp.nl | www.eurocampings.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0