Serving alternative html pages for flash sites

[MarieN]

Some artists etc. who use lots of flash on their entire domains have started serving alternative, html rich and meta tag rich pages to crawlers. They determine which page to serve by checking if the visitor can view flash. This is a really a form of cloaking since content is entirely different (usually no HTML is added to the flash pages). Anyone have any experience in how SE's treat these cases in reality? I have seen both good and bad results for these sites.

[phranque]

you want this:
swfobject - Google Code [code.google.com]

if you present essentially the same content in html that the flash enabled user sees you will not be penalized for cloaking.

[MarieN]

Thanks phranque.

[grouch]

this is only my way to do it
when you're using swf object and want to determine alternative content you should set _SESSION variables by javascript and unless you want to wait till next browser hard refresh -> execute refresh/redirect on a browser
then, you may want paste some code in your php:

<?php

<div id="example" style=" width: 680px; height: 100px; z-index:26;" >
<?php
if ( $_COOKIE["hasFlash"] != 1 ) {
?>
Alternative content example
<?php
}
?>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF("test.swf", "example",
"680", "100", "9.0.0","expressInstall.swf" );
var playerVersion = swfobject.getFlashPlayerVersion();
if ( Number ( playerVersion.major ) >= 9 ) {
setCookie("hasFlash",1);
}
</script>

?>

[edited by: eelixduppy at 2:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2009]
[edit reason] no URLs, please [/edit]