by Jon Ricerca

 

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: