Question

I really want a way to have one single file for, for example, the navigation bar and the footer so that I don’t have to go through all of my pages (only 20 or so, but anyway…) to update it. So I’ve realized that frames (iframes? What’s the difference) can help me with this.

Additionally, I’ve heard a lot of places that frames are a no-go in web design for some reason. Is this to do with SEO?

Can I use (i)frames safely? Are there alternatives that keep the url http://www.domain.tld/pagename.html ?

Answer 1

Adding to these two good answers, from the SEO point of view a frame based site is also might be a bad idea.

Google supports frames and iframes to
the extent that it can. Frames can
cause problems for search engines
because they don’t correspond to the
conceptual model of the web. In this
model, one page displays only one URL.
Pages that use frames or iframes
display several URLs (one for each
frame) within a single page. Google
tries to associate framed content with
the page containing the frames, but we
don’t guarantee that we will.

See this

As a side note, have yo considered 301 redirect? It is not precisely keeping the same address, rather the opposite but it might be what you want if I understood your concern.