Advantage to using iframe over 301 redirect?

[Scott ClientClicks]

I've taken over marketing for a new lawyer client and he has a situation that I haven't seen before. His old domain (I'll call it oldsite.com) is no longer being used and his new domain which I'll call newsite.com, is the one that's being built out and promoted.

However, if you enter in his old domain in a browser, it pulls up a duplicate of newsite.com and doesn't redirect to the new site's url.

After viewing the page source, I can see that the old site is simply showing the new site in a frame. I tried to paste in the iframe code here, but it gets filtered.

Do you see any advantage or disadvantage to setting up a "redirect" as a frame?

I would have expected the old site to 301 redirect to the new site to pass domain authority and wouldn't expect any authority to pass this way.

 

[James Watt]

I just saw a post on moz two weeks ago that relates if you haven't seen it yet:
https://moz.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand

For local SEO at least, a redirect is likely much better than an iframe setup like that (why would anyone even think to do that?) but it's still not as good as cleaning up the website listings to actually be the new domain in as many old backlinks/citations as possible (especially the higher value ones the client has).

At least, that's my two cents.

 

[50Bubbles]

Redirect it. (it's curious how the site got set up with iframes in the first place since the implication is that you yourself didn't do it). That implies that you don't have control of the old domain, which itself is a problem.

A site as you describe it (a bunch of pages with iframes) doesn't mean much to the search engines and will start to drop off in Google's index. Whenever you build a new site and switch domains, you want to preserve the indexing in the old domains. It's very likely that if the site has been out there a while, there are a lot of links both from Google searches and possibly other sites (citations, directories et al). Best practice is to map (via 301 redirect) every URL from the old site to it's corresponding URL in the new site. That's a little more work than just redirecting the domain but it's worth the extra effort.

 

[addaminsane]

There is no advantage. iframes load slow and have no seo value. There are very few instances if any anymore in which an iframe should be used. Its definitely incompatible with the mobile world which is now the king of local search.