Frames and SEO : what have I done ???

[FlodAriege]

Hello to all of you,

I'm beginning with my first website, and now it is online, I get comments that are frightening me about the SEO : my pages seems to contain frames. Which I did not intend.
What have I done wrong ? How could I modify my layout so the frames disappear ?
the url below is not my homepage, because my homepage (published my website today only), is probably the worst of all my pages (no h1, h2, etc...)

Could you please have a look at this page and tell me how to fix the problem ?

http://www.rouchenergies.fr/html/cha...u_solaire.html

If you miss any important information, please be indulgent as I am a beginner... Just tell me what you need and I will be back with the missing information

Thank you.

[franko]

Fear not. Simply open up your .nod file, click in the master border and open the masterborder properties pallette. 4th button along is the frames section. Uncheck the checkbox which says, 'Generate HTML frames borders' and republish the entire site. I always Local Publish and then use ftp to upload, but if you're going to publish direct to server makes sure you delete all NoF generated files first.

This is the reason I always use Local Publish - I can just delete the entire Local Publish directory contents whereas I have a number of files on the server (Google verification, for example) which are not generated by NoF and which it would be a pain if I deleted them by accident.

[Thomas Frei-Herrmann]

hi Franko - NOF 12 is now deleting pages and files which are not used anymore.

[RayC]

hi Franko - NOF 12 is now deleting pages and files which are not used anymore.

Hmmm... This probably should be a new topic, but this is the first I've heard of this. How does NOF determine which files to delete?

[Thomas Frei-Herrmann]

well - just try it, delete a photo or mark a page as "do not publish" or switch to .php and try.

[FlodAriege]

Dear Franko,
It seems that you definitely are my web angel !
I di this verification, and in me masterborder properties, this checkbox is already unchecked.
So I'm beginning to think that finally my site does NOT have any frames.
The same person told me my site also have "tables" : sorry I don't know the real word in english, but he was talking about something very bad for SEO. Would you know what he's talking about ? Is that the few tables I used to put pictures inside ?
PS : I finally realized, thanks to Mia on this forum, that the version of NOF I'm using is not NOF 12, but more or less NOF 11 (1&1 Edition, which is free version). I guess it does not change anything about frames ...?
I do just as you do : Local Publish, then I use Filezilla to upload my files.

[RayC]

Well, you should take another look and make sure ALL of the frame boxes are unchecked (Top, Bottom, Left, Right). Using frames can result in someone finding only one of the frames on your site when doing a search. Like this:
http://www.rouchenergies.fr/html/lef...u_solaire.html

As you can see, this is not helpful.

NOF uses invisible tables to layout your pages when it generates the HTML. I don't know that it's such a big deal for SEO, and I still use it as it seems the most stable. It is not until NOF 12 that there is an alternative publish method that does not use tables, so for now you are stuck with tables.

HTH

[franko]

NoF uses complex embedded tables to layout pages as Ray said, if you are using html 4.01 with tables (in v11 it's called dynamic page layout). However, it appears SEs are now liking pages that are laid out using <divs> rather than <tables>. However, I wouldn't worry too much as there are many much more important ranking criteria involved and my own web sites continue to rank on the first page of Google for the search terms I want.

However, it is an increasingly good idea to generate <divs> and you do this using xhtml as the output method. I found this a bit clunky layout-wise in v11 but it seems to be better in v12, so I'd probably recommend upgrading to v12. Remember that because your web site is set to xhtml output it doesn't mean everything on every page has to use the same output method. I sometimes find it necessary to use a html 4.10 (Fixed Layout) layout method for a layout region, for example. A recent example of this was when I converted a site to xhtml output but found that the images in my Visual Lightbox gallery were displaying underneath the nav bar (in that the nav bar lay across the image so you couldn't see the full image). Changing the layout region output method to html 4.01 while keeping the whole page output as xhtml fixed the problem.

[FlodAriege]

Thank you Ray and Franko
So I'm going, first, to check every single page, chasing for frame box checked...
--> I can't see any frame box checked, but I don't understand what means the (1) and (2) ont the masterborder properties palette (see picture) ???

About tables, I understand I can't do nothing about it until I upgrade to v12. I hope I will be able to re-use my content without to much work when I have to move from table structure to div structure ...

Thanks again.

[RayC]

It's a little hard to see, but you do have Right and Bottom frames selected. Note how they are darker/recessed. The numbers indicate the order of the frames -- irrelevant unless you are using them, so I will spare you the explanation.

Click once on Right and once on Bottom so they are not darker and have no numbers. I don't recall if there is a number when you only have one frame -- just ensure they are not selected.