[WEB4LIB] Frames and Search Engines

[Michael Sauers]

> The question I have is what is the best way of preventing search 
> engines from indexing every page on the frames version?

This is quite an interesting question. But first, a comment:
Why not index everything?

Answers:
By default most SEs don't index frames based sites. They will index stuff
in the <noframes> area but not in a <frame src>. So, by putting just
frames in and no <noframes> code you're pertty safe.

However, you should always include <noframes> text for browsers that don't
display frames i.e. Lynx

So, you frame your site and put in <noframes> text. How do you prevent
indexing of particular pages?

1) For global or directory level index prevention put a robots.txt file in
your server root directory.

2) For page level index prevention include noindex and/or nofollow in the
page's <meta>.

Michael Sauers					         msauers at bcr.org
Internet Trainer	 	      (personal) www.webpan.com/msauers/
Bibliographic Center for Research (BCR)	(business) www.bcr.org/~msauers/
     All opinions expressed are just my own unless otherwise noted.