What is a Frame and why are they not liked by the search engines?

That's a good question, Gavin!

Search engines will not penalize your page for using frames, but they may have difficulty indexing them into their results.

Also, you have the navigation problem for your visitors, as follows: A framed page consists of other pages. Say you have your navigation down the left side of your layout, and a larger frame on the right for your main content. Google rates one of your content pages very highly and indexes it. When the visitor clicks on the SERP result link, they are taken to the content page, but the page won't be loaded as part of the frameset (ie. the sidebar/navigation of your site won't be shown).

You CAN do a javascript check to make sure the frameset is present each time a page is loaded (and if it's not present, reload the frameset), but this seems like a lot of work for something that could be avoided with just a better site layout on one page. Use templates instead.

Here are some more search engine mistakes.

I hope this answers your question and that you enjoyed your Dreamweaver course yesterday.

Regards, Rich