Ask your average SEO expert about using iframes and they'll probably be quick to tell you to avoid them because Google doesn't index them. But did you know that's actually a common misconception? In this article we shed some light on the topics and what to expect in terms of SEO performance.
Will iframes be indexed by Google?
The short answer is: yes 👍
Historically, there was a time when search engines struggled to crawl and index content within iframes. Search engine robots couldn’t access the content inside iframes, and in some cases, they couldn’t exit the iframe to continue crawling the rest of the website.
But that time is long gone and Google has made significant advancements in crawling iframes. They can directly render the iframe and inject its content as part of the hosting page, a process also known as “DOM Flattening.”
Will it negatively impact SEO value?
The short answer is: no.
Let's start first by stating that there's no negative SEO effect to using iframes on a page, it won't negatively impact the indexing of that particular page or anything like that. But together with that statement it should be also said that nothing beats having the HTML content rendered right there and then on your page as part of your actual DOM / first-line HTML content.
Google will try to index your iframe content and it is valid content to have on your page, but of course it would never be the recommended method since you're loading in content from another domain, which will always be sub-optimal, also for the user experience.
Conclusion
Using iframes can be a convenient way to render third-party content into your own pages without having to write any code and zero effort to maintain it. We wouldn't recommend using this method for your entire newsroom, but for the purpose of what we have built the widget for, which is to list an inline live-feed of news, clippings or events on an already existing page, it could be great use-case.
For any use-case that does beyond this use-case, for example when you want to implement entire newsroom functionalities to your own website, we'd recommend looking into our Newsroom JSON API. Here you can pull the data and render it on your site accordingly either through a backend service or by using AJAX.
Questions? Send us an 📩 at hello@pr.co