Frames: not compatible with search engines

We know sites where 89% of the visitors never loaded the frame set and left the site after helpless clicking from frame fragment to frame fragment without proper navigation.

The main idea of frames is:

There is a page defining the frame set
There is a page with all the navigation
There are all the pages with the content

But it happens that the pages with the content become indexed by the searchengines. According to the idea of frames, the pages with the content have no navigation system. So when somebody finds such a page by a searchengine and visits, he is on a page with no navigation system.

The most disasterouse case, we have ever seen like this was a motorcycle dealer in Germany. He had around 6000 visitors a month, but our analysis of his log files showed:

From 6152 visitors, only 674 loaded the page which defined the frame set. 5478 visitors left the site after helpless clicking around and never finding the navigation system for the site.

<TITLE> Good choice </TITLE>

In German language "Gut gewählt" was the one and only sentence, a search engine was able to find on the index page. The rest of the page was the definition of the frame set.

Behind this start page only indexed with "good choice" had been around 1000 customers very enthusiastic about their success in internet. We used this site as a bad example from December 1996 to January 1999. The company which created this total disaster in search engine unfriendly design went bancrupt January 1999.