search engine recognise flash

[sawfish]

Is there any really effective way of getting your flashsite recognised by search engines?

 

[firegambler]

hi,

as far as i know search enginges cannot see what's in the movie.
you can just add keywords of the site in your meta tags
or write the site's content in a comment on the html-site so that it probably can be searched by the machine but not be seen by the user. (and if the comment-thing doesn't work you can still write it in the same color as the site's background - same effect, even less effort)

regards

 

[billwatson]

have a look at

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/05/08/HNburgessint_1.html

also i believe google..and thats all that really matters can now parse swf's.

 

[firegambler]

damn good link bill.

are you sure google supports swf-parsing yet?
i mean i couldn't find anything 'bout that on the google-site

regards

 

[billwatson]

http://weblog.bergersen.net/archives/000252.html

 

[firegambler]

respect, pretty good research!

regards

 

[Genimuse]

Be very, very careful with the text-color-same-as-the-background thing -- this will get your site banned from Google if they discover it (note, too, that their automated crawling does some basic checking for this).

 

[firegambler]

that is interesting, i didn't know that. why do they?

regards

 

[billwatson]

probably the best way is to use 'cloaking'. most of the well known search engines have a static IP address.
so just check the incoming IP address against a list of known search engines and give them a special HTML only page to index.
cloaking is very much looked down upon but is probably the best way to get relevant content indexed in a search engine. its done server side using PHP, ASP, etc. so it's almost impossible for the search engine to find out its being duped.

 

[Genimuse]

They do it because they want their searches to be accurate. People usually use the color-on-same-color text to encourage the engine to rate their site more highly, but that's stuff the user never sees and there's no reason to believe that the page is truly any better than another page where the words are included appropriately.

Google also removes pages permanently for cloaking.

Here's their take on it:

We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.
​

Really, be careful. You're better off just creating a good site with appropriate keywords, description, and title, and encouraging appropriate links to your site.

 

[sawfish]

So you reckon the best idea is really just to have a good but fast loading HTML page first with all your metatags etc and an 'enter' button. Ideally I suppose a site with both HTML and FLASH all through might be best. I've heard web position gold is very good also.

 

[billwatson]

well then i guess you must use something like this with caution

http://dreamcost.com/?page=dreamcloak

i wonder just how good spiders are at detecting cloaking

 

[jstreich]

Or be a real internet pillar and OFFER an HTML version of the site. Making your site "FLASH only", limits your hits on search engines, and decreases the number of people who can veiw it (that is those who can find it and veiw it will be severly limited). Remeber that there are a lot of TEXT ONLY browsers, people who don't like plugins (and waiting for content to load). The best option is a main page where the USER can chose FLASH or NON-Flash version.

Consider this: Site visits limited by the fact that the content is in flash format because of search hit reduction, site visits limited by the fact that people get tired of waiting for SWF to load and leave before seeing content, number of people with cell phones/pda/text only browsers who can't see your content even after page loads increases with version of Flash you install... Be kind, when doing a flash site, make sure that the CONTENT and NAVIGATION are both accessable with the highest security browser settings and the least plugins. Doing otherwise only limits the number of visiters you get, and the number that return... The only exception I can thik of to this rule is if the only content is the Flash eye candy... and then a message explaining to why "lower" veiwer settings can't see the page.