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I'm working on a site that has a template with a number of static links to social sites such as twitter, facebook, etc. To avoid those counting as external links from each page, should I put them in an iframe? Is there a benefit or drawback to doing this?

How are social links typically handled?

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Not even worth worrying about. – John Conde♦ Apr 28 '11 at 20:42
Thanks John. I guess since everybody has those, the search engines probably almost disregard them. Never considered it that way, but it makes sense. – JMC Apr 29 '11 at 2:25
I added a real answer to expand on my original comment. – John Conde♦ Jun 3 '11 at 2:38

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If you are hard-linking to these sites and they are on every page, then placing them in an iframe is not a bad idea as it will prevent you from having a lot of external links "draining" PR from your website. (Actually, it's just preventing you from maximizing the PR on your site). The more of pages these are on the better this idea becomes.

If these links are on only a few pages then it really doesn't matter. Those few external links are really inconsequential.

If you are using JavaScript code to place like buttons and retweet buttons then you don't need to do anything since search engines won't parse this JavaScript and thus those links will be invisible to them.

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Thanks for the follow-up and breaking down the difference between buttons and static links. The template for this site puts the static social links on every page. I cut out some of the less consequential links, but I'll also try the iframe since they're everywhere. – JMC Jun 3 '11 at 14:08

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