I'm working with a small team on a web app.
Background
For many years we have run a informational website. It gets lots of traffic (1M+ per month) and is near the top on the first page of the search engines for our keywords. This website is basically an informational database with text and illustrations. It has been curated by our "principal" for this time. He is an expert in our field, but has absolutely no technical expertise. Seriously... he built the whole site using static HTML pages and now has over 1000 .html files to maintain. I didn't get involved with this project until it was too late.
Anyways, let's call this site info.com.
Issue
We are now creating an interactive web application that utilizes the information from the other site.
We'll call this "app.com".
Our "principal" has created the specifications for the app, and myself and one other developer are doing the work. In his specifications, he does not want to pull info from info.com in a script, rather, he wants users of app.com to click links to info.com as he believes it will boost the hits on info.com which ultimately lead to sales. However, as a team we are discussing ideas for how to mitigate the "jumping around" between sites. I suggested that when a user "links" back to info.com, we display content from info.com within an iframe on app.com. I liked this idea because in essence the user will see our "app.com" toolbar (top-page fixed, facebook style) overlayed on "info.com", which users of "app.com" will be very familiar with.
The "principal" didn't like this idea because he believed doing this would NOT increase the pagerank of "info.com" and would in fact hurt it if more people access the "info.com" content via the iframe on "app.com". I seriously know nothing about SEO but my gut tells me this is not factual.
TL;DR:
- How does traffic volume affect SEO?
- Will putting content from "info.com" in an iframe on "app.com" hurt the ranking of "info.com" if users of "info.com" start accessing the info via "app.com"?
