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My company sells a solution for doing Q&A for products on e-commerce websites.

The client must add a div containing a link and some JavaScript on their pages, when the link is clicked, it opens an iFrame that contains the questions and answers and allows you to ask one. The content of the iFrame is generated by our web API.

We did it this way so that the integration of our solution remains minimal for the clients.

Our clients want the content to be crawlable, thus improving the pages SEO.

I realize we should of thought of this before, but what possibilities do we have to make the Q&A content visible to Google, and have it reference the client's product page ?

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  • Does it have google analytics? That would make google know about it's existance.
    – Martijn
    Oct 15, 2014 at 8:13
  • I just realized the link opened in the iFrame is freely accessible. Could I simply put a canonical link on this page referencing the product link from the e-commerce site ?
    – ThunderDev
    Oct 15, 2014 at 9:31
  • Might this answer help? webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/71265/…
    – Max
    Oct 22, 2014 at 23:28

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I'm pretty sure the content in an iframe it's always going to be read as coming from the iframe page, and not the page the iframe is embedded on.

I have tried in the past defining a canonical tag on the iframe page referencing the page with the iframe on to try and associate the content with that page (as you mentioned in the comments). However every time I tried this the canonical tag was ignored (as you might imagine, as there is no similar content) and the content was still indexed in the SERPs on the iframe page and not the the other page. Perhaps other people have had different results, as to when I experimented?

Also I might add, if the Q&A text is going to be the same over many websites, then if the content gets indexed there could be duplicate content issues. I only mention this as I see lots of duplicate content in similar FAQ sections on sites. Although if its unique to the site, that's fine.

Google mentions here Frames

Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we don't guarantee that we will.

However, I don't think I've seen it actually doing this myself.

I think the best bet would be using something other than iframes to display the content.

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  • What if we inserted the same content as the iframe into the client's page using javascript but only if it's a bot (you can detect it in javascript i think)
    – ThunderDev
    Oct 16, 2014 at 13:12
  • To issues here, the content might not be read if its loaded via js and this could be considered cloaking, serving content on the page to search engines, but not users: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
    – Max
    Oct 16, 2014 at 23:05

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