SEO: If another website uses a iframe from our website, would the links in the iframe appear to be coming from our website or from theirs?

Question

we are creating a "app" on our website that allows affiliates to simply use a generated iframe on their website, which would produce a list of all our products (we sell event vouchers). The links would obviously redirect back to our main website.

We see the benefits of backlinking if the iframe links that pointed back to our website relevant products are treated to have come from our affiliates.

My question is, if the iframe is embedded on their website, would the links be treated as if their are internal (coming from our website to our website) or external (coming from their website to our website)?

If it appears that the links would be coming from our website, is the any other alternative to a iframe that we can use to embed generated code from our website that treats the links as external links to our website?

Thanks for your time

Answer 1

Google say of iframes:

Google supports frames and iframes to the extent that it can. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't correspond to the conceptual model of the web. In this model, one page displays only one URL. Pages that use frames or iframes display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we don't guarantee that we will.

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445?hl=en

My feeling is that the links within that iframe will (if noticed at all) be seen as links from your site to your site. Google will be aware that the iframe content is being pulled from a different domain. Their comment about trying to associate the content is more likely to apply if the iframe is on the same URL and people are using it for layout. This is my opinion, however, and other people may disagree. Google do not seem to say anything more on the matter.

If you want to be sure that a third party site has indexable content generated from your site, then they would have to generate it server-side so that it shows as inline html. You could do this with a feed or with CURL.

I would actually be very wary of your SEO approach, however. Duplicate content on different URLs could (at best) cause a more popular site to be treated as canonical and indexed instead of yours, and (at worst) have your site seen as doing some sort of article marketing, a practise which was hit by the Penguin penalty.

Someone here claimed to have a penalty from affiliate links: Google penalty resulting from duplicate content and backlinks on dealer websites