: What is the proper SEO handling of pages appearing in popups using IFRAMEs? I am working on a CMS which makes use of IFRAMEs to display some forms, for illustration, say a Search form. So
I am working on a CMS which makes use of IFRAMEs to display some forms, for illustration, say a Search form. So the user clicks the Search button and the website reacts by opening a popup window which includes an IFRAME to the actual Search form.
This means I have a "bare"¹ page with the search form. Page which, obviously, is directly accessible via its own URI.
In terms of SEO, the forms have no content worthy of being indexed, so I was thinking to mark them as NOINDEX. Is that the correct way to handle such pages?
From what I read on some other question, Google suggests to put links from IFRAMEs to other pages. However, I definitively do not want a user visible link to the Home page, or whatever page in link with the form, in the content of my forms because that could be misinterpreted by the user. However, if <link> tags would work too, which one should I use? (i.e. "top" would work, right? with the home page in there?)
¹ By bare I mean that the normal theme is not shown, it will be a plain white background with just and only the simplest form.
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The noindex should be enough to stop it getting indexed.
With regards to iframes and linking, I can't actually find any guidelines from Google. In fact, all they seem to officially say on the entire subject of iframes is "Google supports frames and iframes to the extent that it can."
You would need to link to the article you mention for its context, but I assume the purpose of such a link could only be to help with crawling, eg if Google index your iframe then it could be linked back to your main site rather than being seen as a stand-alone page. Page Rank could not flow if you have no links on it.
As you don't want to index it (and I assume don't expect anyone to link directly to it), I can't actually see any reason why you would need to worry about linking it back to your main site.
You could move your form urls to a folder that is blocked via robots.txt file. Then the search engines don´t even bother crawling those.
Your plan to integrate your forms via iframe in your CMS does not seem to be the best approach to me though, at least from a technical and user experience point of view.
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