I have an iframe which content I need Google to index. Is this possible?

Question

I have a classifieds website.

The index.html has a form:

     <form action="php_page" target="iframe" etc...>

The iframe displays the results, and the php_page builds the results for the iframe. Basically the php_page builds a table containing the results from a mysql db, and outputs it.

My problem is that this doesn't get indexed by google.

How can I solve this?

The reason I used an Iframe in the first place was to avoid page-reloading when hitting submit.

Ajax couldn't be used due to various reasons I wont go into here.

Any ideas what to do?

Thanks

UPDATE:

I have a sitemap with URLS to all the classifieds also, but I don't think this guarantees google to spider those URLS.

Answer 1

There is no way to make any webspider fill out and submit forms.

Workaround: Every night, create a dump of the database and save the HTML to a file. Create a link from index.html to that file. Use CSS classes to make the link invisible. This way, Google will pick it up but users won't see it.

Answer 2

Trying to make the google spider crawl the results of a search form is not really the right approach.

Assuming you want google.com users to find your classifieds ads by searching google, the best approach is to create a set of static html pages from the ads, and link them (not invisibly) from elsewhere on your site (probably best from the home page - but such a link can be in a footer or something else unobtrusive)

They can also be linked to from your sitemap XML (you do have a sitemap XML file don't you?)

Note: the <iframe> doesn't really come into this. Or Ajax.