Zazzle no longer allows embedding their pages on other sites. If you try, you get a message like this in Firefox
To protect your security, www.zazzle.com will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.
and Chrome just says
www.zazzle.com refused to connect.
I learned this a while back because I used to use whatismyscreenresolution.net to see how my store banner and such looked at different device resolutions/sizes but a year or so ago, maybe longer, it stopped working because of this change on Zazzle's end.
I don't think there is any real drawback to iframes in that situation. The way I understand, your page/blog isn't getting demerits from Google for using an iframe, it's just that any keywords in the embedded content isn't going to do your own page any good. If you're writing good searchable content for your page/blog post and then use an iframe to easily show a collection of the products you're writing about which happen to live somewhere else, I see no harm no foul as your goal is to get people to those products. If someone is searching for, I don't know, "groovy vintage low budget wedding invites", they might find the products directly on their home site or they might find your page/blog where you've written about them and used an iframe to link to them. And that's really all an iframe is - a link to somewhere else but with an interactive preview of the content. When you include a link on your webpage/blog you never benefit from whatever SEO power the thing you linked to contains; you're just providing a link to that other thing. If you built a site relying on embedded content you'd never get anywhere as Google searches would turn up the original pages not yours where it's just embedded/linked to. But if you're writing your own good content and just using iframes as a convenient "visual link" I don't see a problem.
Your original post, you ruled out using iFrames for SEO reasons. Good advice. I was just adding an FYI that they won't work for Zazzle content anyway as they no longer allow embedding.
In mid January this year, Google (and only Google) introduced a new robots tag: indexifembedded. Nifty's Product Grid Sharer page uses that tag, meaning that any product grids embedded via iframes in your blogs / websites (using the code snippet you get at the bottom of the sharer page) WILL be indexed by Google.
I've created a page on NiftyToolz that embeds a product grid using the iframe code and a Google search demonstrates that the page has been indexed, product grid content included.
Use this search on Google to confirm for yourself:
4th of July Independence Day BBQ Invitations and more site:niftytoolz.com
You need to include the site:niftytoolz.com to make sure you don't have to wade through lots of results to see it.
I hope that puts your mind at rest. If you have questions, just reply and I'll do my best to answer them 😎
Yes, yours 🙂
