Cloaking question

[jacqueschoquette]

I an new to advanced search engine submittion techniques and am having a problem. I am designing most of my sites in flash and am trying to figure a way to increase my search engine compatiblity I was wonder if the following would be possible. Is it possible to create a server side script that can detect the ip address of a spider and then include a pure html code for the spider to index? Is this practical or are there to many IP to deal with? is there a list of spider IP's anyware?

Another question is will the spiders look at text in an dhtml layer with the visiblity set to invisible?

Can anyone provide me links on article dealing with dynamic pages/flash and search engines

Thanks

[Air]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld jacques.

Not only is what you suggest possible, it is being done by many people, what you describe is exactly what cloaking does. If cloaking isn't what you want to do, you could also consider making some static html pages that give the visitor a choice of flash, or to stay with the static pages. You could also use frames and optimize the <noframes> portion for the search engines. Finally, you can use the built in flash option of creating html pages that may rank well on some engines.

See this post [webmasterworld.com]

You can find a list of IP's at [searchengineworld.com]

>Another question is will the spiders look at text in an dhtml layer with the visiblity set to invisible?

My limited experience with dhtml has shown that pages using it rank poorly, take this for what it's worth, it was limited testing.

I don't have any links to flash and optimization articles, there actually is not a lot of information on this topic (might be a good idea for a site).

[tedster]

>Another question is will the spiders look at text in an dhtml layer with the visiblity set to invisible?

I'd say you can succeed if the "invisible" is declared in an external CSS file. I stopped putting style information on the page last year.

However, I have some DHTML on two sites that got very good rank for keyword content that was in an invisible layer -- a layer which a mouseover or click made visible. Both cases were off page css files.