do robots support frames?

Hi,

I have heard lots of conflicting information regarding this topic and it's
still not clear to me if robots actually support sites with frames and are
able to crawl these sites. Does anyone know about this? Also what happens
if there is a <noframes> tag on the main frame. does the robot crawl from
the noframes tag and ignore the other frames???

thanks for any info.
Steve.



--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Holidays in Berchtesgaden, Germany:
http://www.sonnenkoepfl.de
http://unterkunft-berchtesgaden.de
http://pension-berchtesgaden.de

"Steven" <SPAMBLOCKER (AT) gmx (DOT) net> wrote in
news:bha537$v36m3$1 (AT) ID-82797 (DOT) news.uni-berlin.de:

Hi,

I have heard lots of conflicting information regarding this topic and
it's still not clear to me if robots actually support sites with
frames and are able to crawl these sites. Does anyone know about
this? Also what happens if there is a <noframes> tag on the main
frame. does the robot crawl from the noframes tag and ignore the
other frames???

Yes, all the major robots can cope with frames, as long as they are well
structured - plenty of noframes text and links.

Exactly how these are dealt with will vary according to the robot, but it
is good practice to duplicate framed navigation in the no-frames section
for the convenience of non-frame-supporting and voice browsers.

A very useful tool for structuring framed websites is the Lynx text
browser: http://lynx.browser.org/.

If you can navigate your framed site in Lynx, you can be reasonably
confident that most bots will also be able to find their way round it.

You will probably want to think about links and possibly also scripts to
ensure that if someone surfs into a page that is supposed to be framed,
they are able to move on to the rest of the site.

Victoria
--
Clare Associates Ltd
http://www.clareassoc.co.uk/
01822 835802
--