Michael Martinez posted a thread at High Rankings Forums basically confirming earlier reports that Google will see and pass value of a link within an iframe.
Michael said he ran his own independent test.
Michael said:
So I designed a simple two-stage test in December to see what would happen. The test is such that if the link passes anchor text in the first stage there is no need to try the second stage.I embedded an iframed page on one of my older sites. It is well-indexed, has never been penalized, and has sufficient inbound links that I was confident it would be recrawled and re-indexed within a short period of time. It is also a low traffic site (it used to have more traffic a few years ago) so I felt it was probably a safe place to run a link test without attracting too much attention.
The iframed page only contains one in-body HTML element, a link pointing to HighRankings.com with the anchor text of "jill whalen says search engines crawl iframes". This was, until I ran my test, an expression that did not appear in Google's search results (when you wrap quotes around it).
I let the test be through the holidays and checked it today. The expression now appears in Google's search results.
He is extremely confident about his test that Google can crawl iFramed pages and follow the links within them.
Forum discussion at High Rankings Forums.
