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My company sells a Q&A solution for e-commerce sites. They basically have a button on their product pages that opens an iframe containing a forum with questions and answers.
We would like the content to be referenced by search engines, but as we are using iframes it will not work.
Can we simply call a javascript on page load, inserting the content into the page, but only if it's a Google bot crawling the site ?
No. That would be serving content specifically for the benefit of search engines (i.e. to manipulate your rankings) which is against the terms of service of the search engines (i.e. this is black hat SEO). You either need to make this content available outside of an iframe, link to the iframe in your XML sitemap (assuming the contents can be loaded as a stand alone page), or accept this content as not being available to be indexed.
display:none and Google determines that it is never shown then it will be ignored (or, worst case, seen as possible spamming.)
Instead of using iFrames, you could load the content into the page using AJAX. Then you could implement Google's crawlable AJAX.
That way both users and bots would be able to get the content.
