---
title: SEO & iframes
permalink: /v5/seo/
---

Since Coral is embedded in an article page using an iframe, we often get asked what affect, 
if any, iframes have on a publisher’s SEO. We asked Hart Van Santvoord, Vox Media’s resident
SEO expert to give us some insight to help answer these questions.

We can confidently say that today's modern crawlers are able to crawl and index content in 
iframes and that they do their best to associate the two and identify which version is preferred.
This isn’t as relevant however for content that is complementary to an article, such as comments
here in Coral’s case, or with other embedded content like documents or live blogs. It’s is more 
important for products or people who are iframing entire pages, such as for syndication.

[Here's commentary on that from John Mueller of Google, probably the most trusted 
Google technical SEO resource we have.](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-iframes-seo-24098.html )

When newsrooms and organizations come to us with SEO questions, it usually falls into 
2 use cases.

1. We need our comments to be indexed to help our SEO!

For this case, we are very confident that the way Coral is currently handling comments 
via iframe provides the SEO benefit publishers are looking for:

* Google can crawl it and associate it with the container article/page
* They're certainly seeing commenting activity as a positive sign of engagement which 
Google cares about A LOT
* Ongoing commenting also indicates to google that the page is evolving/updating, 
another strong signal
* Serving via iframe typically improves performance as opposed to including the content 
directly on the parent page, and faster/better speed and UX is yet another strong positive 
signal to Google

For an example of how the Vox Media SEO team has analyzed iframe content outside of Coral, 
we can can look The Verge. The Verge leverages live blogging for certain types of events, 
[such as iPhone events](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20840715/apple-iphone-11-event-live-blog-announcement-photos). 
In this case, similar to Coral, the live blog content itself is embedded on The Verge article 
via iframe but no doubt leads to a more engaged audience who stick around longer, refreshes, 
clicks load more, etc. We see these articles perform well in search in a super competitive 
space on event days.

That brings us to our 2nd use case:

2. Please, make sure my comments are NOT indexed!

In this request, the use case is slightly more complicated due to the fact we know 
Google can crawl and index comment content. But, given that Coral does not also 
create creating a page just with the comments, we don’t see a chance Google would
Surface just comment content in search results outside of the article in which they’re
embedded.

If you’re a publisher in this scenario and are worried about the content in comments 
reflecting poorly on your site/brand then this seems to be as much as moderation issue 
As a Google one, and again, Coral does not provide a way for Google to crawl, index, 
and serve up commenting content outside the context of the article regardless.

If you are a newsroom doing creative things with your comments and perhaps would 
Have the need to create a separate page with only comments, then you can certainly explore
Using tools like a canonical tag to redirect that page back to the container page, and other
SEO best practices for this and other edge cases. 
