iframe or flash widget for seo?

I need to insert a widget in a webpage

I can either:

Pull a javascript page through an iframe

insert a flash widget

which would be {easier to|better for} SEO?

(am inserting onto a wordpress page)

(note: I know that they're both crap things to SEO, however they're my only two options for this scenario)

If you want to attempt to keep your widget hidden from the SEs, pop a hidden div using jquery and obfuscate the code used to launch the div (chop up the urls so there are no urls visible in the source). Put an iframe in the div. In the iframe, insert your flash widget, called from another domain which is blocked by robots.txt.

If there's nothing dodgy about your widget then just call it directly on the page. There's nothing inherently bad about using javascript or flash on a page.

If you want to attempt to keep your widget hidden from the SEs, pop a hidden div using jquery and obfuscate the code used to launch the div (chop up the urls so there are no urls visible in the source). Put an iframe in the div. In the iframe, insert your flash widget, called from another domain which is blocked by robots.txt.

If there's nothing dodgy about your widget then just call it directly on the page. There's nothing inherently bad about using javascript or flash on a page.

Click to expand...

thank you

I want my widget as visible as possible to SE's - are they more likely to see it if it's:
1) javascript through an iframe

or

2) a flash widget

or

3) no big difference?

For SEO, flash is at least on page whereas an Iframe is not.

If the iframe needs access to referring URL or cookies then it needs to be hosted on the same URL host name or you will need a P3P Compact Privacy Policy added to your webservers default response headers, otherwise IE users will have to lower their privacy settings. If you are hosting all from the same host name then no problem.

Both methods potentially cause back button weirdness if users will interact with them. You may have to account for deep linking in your SEO tuning strategy which would make things a lot harder.

Flash doesn't work on Iphones and Ipads.

hopefully this info helps...

Fwiffo said:

thank you

I want my widget as visible as possible to SE's - are they more likely to see it if it's:
1) javascript through an iframe

or

2) a flash widget

or

3) no big difference?

Click to expand...

Difficult to say without knowing what your widget is or does. Since Google doesn't index flash yet (although they probably spider and are attempting to process it) I would use javascript, and include whatever stuff you want indexed in the noscript tag.

I've had stuff in iframes indexed before (with no backlinks) but it's unclear how link juice is transferred. If you make a page with a jquery div over the top of your content and then look at that page in Google Instant Preview (those preview images on the serps) you can see that the preview bot at least is executing javascript - ie. you'll see the overlay div in the preview image.

For SEO, flash is at least on page whereas an Iframe is not.

If the iframe needs access to referring URL or cookies then it needs to be hosted on the same URL host name or you will need a P3P Compact Privacy Policy added to your webservers default response headers, otherwise IE users will have to lower their privacy settings. If you are hosting all from the same host name then no problem.

Both methods potentially cause back button weirdness if users will interact with them. You may have to account for deep linking in your SEO tuning strategy which would make things a lot harder.

Flash doesn't work on Iphones and Ipads.

hopefully this info helps...

Click to expand...

helps very much as always

iframe would be through to javascript on same server/URL. Just can't get the JS to work properly within a wordpress post/page, so need an alternate route (therefore iframe)

seeing that it's on the same server, think the the SE's will do anything to associate content within an iframe with the page itself? Even thought it's my preferred route, I'm somewhat apprehensive with going this way as it may end up as a "split personality" page with the SE's "liking" both the page and the iframed data, but not loving either of them enough to rank them where I want them....

Difficult to say without knowing what your widget is or does. Since Google doesn't index flash yet (although they probably spider and are attempting to process it) I would use javascript, and include whatever stuff you want indexed in the noscript tag.

I've had stuff in iframes indexed before (with no backlinks) but it's unclear how link juice is transferred. If you make a page with a jquery div over the top of your content and then look at that page in Google Instant Preview (those preview images on the serps) you can see that the preview bot at least is executing javascript - ie. you'll see the overlay div in the preview image.

Click to expand...

thank you kindly

was your indexed iframe data indexed to the page containing the iframe, or did the data that was iframed get indexed?

Fwiffo said:

was your indexed iframe data indexed to the page containing the iframe, or did the data that was iframed get indexed?

Click to expand...

If the page with the iframe code in it was domain1.com/page.html, and the actual iframe page was domain2.com/iframe.html, the iframe content got indexed as domain2.com/iframe.html. In other words, domain2.com/iframe.html got indexed just from being called by domain1.com/page.html. There were no backlinks to domain2.com/iframe.html.

In this case, I was using jquery to pop a div over the top of domain1.com/page.html. In this overlay div was the the iframe containing domain2.com/iframe.html. On domain1.com/page.html, there was no reference to the iframe - the div and the iframe were called entirely from external javascript.

However, if you look at the Google Instant Preview of domain1.com/page.html, it shows the iframed content of domain2.com/iframe.html popped over the top, meaning that the preview bot executes javascript.

However if you really want to get stuff indexed, the noscript tag is your friend because anything you put in <noscript> is guaranteed to get indexed.