I don't get it - I thought frames were hot stuff 5 or 6 years ago, and
you were obsolete if your browser couldn't handle frames.

Now I'm being advised that frames are no good because google doesn't
work with them well.

I don't get it - with all the sophistication of the internet, why
can't google pick up a couple of "frame name" commands when its
updating its search engine?

Can you pay to list with google, to avoid having to rewrite a site
that was done with frames?

Good Day skip9801,

From a technological point of view, frames were never that hot.  I
have been developing web sites for 6 years now, and since day one have
been told to avoid them, and have done so religiously.

Search engines do not really dig into link references on a page. This
is done with good reason. Can you imagine if a search engine tried
indexing every link on a page it visits?  And than every link on the
pages it followed from the main page? On, and on, and on?  The poor
robot on the other side would work itself to death and fill up
Terabytes of storage space. Since the robots crawl left and right,
they would quickly start arriving at pages that were indexed by other
processes and start duplicating information, creating a very large
useless database.

No, robots never liked frames.

There are ways to ensure that even if you use frames, your web site
can be listed in search engines. Since our friend the robot is not
allowed to follow links, we have to make sure it finds something
useful on every page. This means no pages with just references to
other files, but some real content too.

How do we do that you ask? The <noframes> tag. Yes, it is just as
useful with search engines today, as it was 5 years ago.

If you add some content into the <noframes> tag, all of a sudden your
main index file is not just a reference file. It now has content that
a search engine can look at and spider.

As you might have noticed, search engines quite often will use the
first couple of lines from a web site as a describing paragraph for a
link. You might already have a good descriptive paragraph in your main
body file referenced in the frameset file, but you have to make sure
that the same information is available in your main index file.  Now
the search engine knows what to do with your web site.

By now you probably already know the answer to your question regarding
a paid listing to bypass the limitations of the robot spidering pages.
With or without a paid listing, the robot will behave the same. The
only way a paid listing might help you out is when the page is hand
added by an editor.

The <noframes> tag will take you a long way, but by no means solve all
the problems.  Some search engines even refuse to look at a web site
if it has frames, with or without the <noframes> alternative. 
Combined with Meta tags, you should do okay.

For more information on search engines and how to get as much out of
them as possible, you can try doing a search for:
"search engine"+"frames"+"list"+"how"

Or see some of the links I am including below. Good luck with your
venture, and I hope I was able to clarify some of the mysteries about
search engines. Please do not hesitate to ask for a clarification if
my explanation requires a different approach for better understanding.

In short, you probably do not have to redesign your web site. Try
using the <noframes> tag, combined with <meta> tags. More on both can
be found in the linkes provided below.

Search Engine Watch (very useful)
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Search engine submission - How to avoid trouble
http://www.sitescreamer.com/search-engine-submission-how-to-avoid-trouble.html

How to list higher on search engines
http://www.netatlantic.com/strategy/searchenginetips.html

Thank you for your question.

Regards,
slawek-ga

Great Answer!  Offered very constructive advice!

One of the negatives about frames, is that search engines index
individual pages. If they index an individual page that is part of a
frameset, and that page appears in search results, and you or I visit
it - it will be incomplete in terms of how it was meant to be seen. If
the page is broken up into 4 quarters, we would only see 1 quarter of
how the page was intended to be viewed, and typically with no means to
see the rest.

"Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to
cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so
on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every
page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the site
as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an
individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual
page is not displayed in a frame -- because there may be no frame set
corresponding to that page.
If you are concerned with the description of your site as seen by
search engines, please read "Search Engines and Frames". It describes
the use of the 'NoFrames' tag, which is used to provide alternative
content. If, instead of providing alternative content, you use wording
such as "This site requires the use of frames" or "Upgrade your
browser", then you are excluding both search engines and people who
use browsers with frames turned off. (For example, audio web browsers,
such as those used in automobiles and by the visually impaired,
typically do not deal with frames, which are a visual mechanism.) You
can read about NoFrames in the HTML standard here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/frames.html#h-16.4 "
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html