I'd been wondering about this question, now I've found the answer:

Even if you don't use <noframes> type tags to guide the search engines into your site, both Yahoo and the new MSN beta search follow the main <frame src="webpage.html"> link fine. Only Google does not appear to do so.

This is easily determined by simply reading your log files, when you don't have a <noframes> link to the frame content pages, the bots will request the pages only if they read the <frames src=...> link, and follow it. Yahoo does, MSN does.

This is worth keeping in mind when implementing certain solutions. If you don't want your frames pages indexed at all simply block the frame container page itself in robots.txt [robots.txt is a file that search engine robots request, legitimate ones are supposed to follow it, it's located in your root directory, with your index/home page, plain text file]:

This will disallow all legitimate bots from these pages, they will index the links in some cases, like Google currently, but not the page itself, or the frame content pages.
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