I am trying to build an embeddable widget that does not have to be ran using an iframe. This is because I have heard that iframes damage a websites SEO performance (see here). If this is not possible within Bubble.io, I can custom code the widget and poll the Bubble API to pull information from the widget. However, it would be simpler to have the widget built inside Bubble.io if possible.
Is there any way to do this? @keith I ran across your responses in this article, but I think the only option was to do it in an iframe.
Any embeddable widget, no matter how you do it (code it/create it) is ultimately an iframe. So, get over that part. But, I don’t have a solution to offer you in terms of a sexy way to do such things in Bubble. It’s something I keep meaning to work on, but haven’t yet.
As a proof/example of the above, just go install some chat thing on a Bubble site (like Drift or FreshChat or whatever) and inspect what it does. Here’s FreshChat running on my site:
See? Even though you just install some js, what that js does it ultimately presents content in an iframe. But SEO here isn’t an issue, right? This is just my chat widget. Nobody needs to find that. It’s simply a service running on my site. (That is, nobody’s going to find your service because of the widget running on some site via a search engine. However, you could of course put a link on your widget so that people who run across it might drill down into your service, should you choose to do that.)
Anyway, I haven’t spent the time writing a sexy wrapper for Bubble iframes. (I would, but there’s other things that I think are more valuable, like enabling oEmbed and Bubble doesn’t make it possible to do that, so my own service that generates iframes just spits out HTML code that folks embed in their sites.) I’ll get around to it sometime, but it’s not something I’ve tackled just yet. There are lots of (older) articles about how to do this (not with Bubble, but in general) that are a touch out of date and many are poorly written, but hey that’s the interwebz, right?
I just can’t see correlation between simple widgets (Bubble page in a iframe) and SEO issues. Your on-page SEO on the parent page (the page that holds the iframe embedded) has NOTHING to do with the page being displayed at the iframe.
What causes SOME damage to your SEO is put your Bubble page that has all SEO ok, in a iframe 100% width and height, like it was the hosting page. You simply can not expect that a iframed Bubble page SEO act as a non-iframed Bubble page SEO.
Currently Google can read iframe content but i can tell you without doubt that the SEO out-of-frame is not the same that the in-the-frame.
That said, if your page is a simple widget as Keith showed us, you shouldn’t even care about SEO, because the widget is a SERVICE (that has already been sold on a page that is concerned with SEO).
