An advertising company that only builds all-Flash sites wants me to pitch them on SEO and SEM services. Their sites are typically all one Flash file, and not separate Flash files in HTML pages. I'm preparing myself for a couple of "gotcha" questions by the developer, who I understand has no use for SEO people. I noticed that his solution for searchability was to place each page's Flash based text (no text in the source code, as for example, in <noscript> tags), in one separate .html page.
That separate, stand-alone HTML page contains, paragraph by paragraph, the text from every flash page. There's a notation on that page that says "this is for the search engines" and a link to the Flash home page.
When searching Google for that .html page's URL, Google does not return a result. But when I search a unique phrase on that page Google does return the page. And the page URL appears in site: search.
I saw the WebmasterWorld post on July 1, 2008 regarding Adobe's claim that they are going to allow search engines' reading and indexing of .swf files, as is, and retroactively. But is this really working?
See [webmasterworld.com...]
My question is, what is the best fix to get text that's in Flash indexed-- and on the page it belongs on?
Is it still to place each page's text into <noscript> tags in the HTML source code for that particular page?
I think this guy's method is essentially worthless. Yes, it does get the textual content into the search engines, but not on the pages where it belongs. For example, this method would prevent getting backlinks to internal pages, when you needed to do so.
