Iframe effect on Search Engines

[kavicarter]

Full post can be viewed here: http://community.discountasp.net/showthread.php?t=7449

But the main point/question is as follows:

Well I have access to the .com (through a CMS; again no FTP access).

What I was able to do is on the abc.com/home page, I put an iframe on the page to fit the entire page. Then in the iframe I put abc.net/home.

Obviously, this causes some problems, users can't see the url and they never truly navigate to another page.

My question is: what are the effects on the search engines?

The .com website (which was the "live" website up until the last week in February) comes up at the top of google searches.

Since users are still going to be "visiting" the .com, will my page ranks be adversely affected?

(For instance, let's say my abc.com/contactus comes up at the top of google search and is clicked on, the user is actually seeing abc.net/contactus but VISITED abc.com/contact us; so shouldn't my page ranks remain intact?)

[Jmeeks]

It's really going to depend from a coding standpoint what the search engine bots see. frames in general are bad for the bots because they won't see what is actually in the frame just the HTML code around the frame.

In the long run it could affect your ranking because the search engine is going to be looking for content and if all the content is in the frame they don't see, then they will see less value in the page and drop it in the rankings.

[kavicarter]

Hypothetically, what if around the frame I put the same content that would be on the page, but I just make it hidden? Would this help in any manner?

[Jmeeks]

Technically the search engines look at that as spam since you are hiding the text. Anytime text is hidden from the average user so only a search engine bot can view it, the search engine will flag the site and then de-value it in the listings because of it. In extreme cases of spamming and hiding text search engines will just kick a site out of the listings all together.

[kavicarter]

I see. Thanks for your help. Hopefully I get the issue resolved before my website rankings are damaged.