Forum Moderators: open
Any idea..."How to optimize a site for Google which is entirely in FLASH ".
Any tips and techniques?
Thanks in advance
My index page has a JavaScript which determines if the visitor has a Flash plugin, and what version the plugin is. If they don't have the Flash plugin or if they have version 4 or below, an error message is generated on the index page which says "Unable to load animated site due to the following reason: You need to install the Flash 5 or 6 plugin to view the animated website."
Then in the text I give them the link to where they can find that plugin and I also provide links to text versions of the other pages on my site in case they don't feel like getting the plugin (and so search engines can follow the links and spider the rest of the pages).
If they have the Flash 5 plugin they are redirected to the Flash 5 index. Flash 6 visitors are redirected to the Flash 6 index.
Search engines don't have Flash plugins so I don't suspect that they are being redirected to the Flash pages and my text index is listed in the SE's. However, none of my other pages are. And a search for "Unable to load animated site due to the following reason" doesn't return any results - it should return my index because that error message should be generated when the SE's visit my page.
So I'm interested to see what others have to say.
I've heard of limited success via using text docs as your content within the flash itself, but I'm not certain of its real ability to rank (any input on that would be greatly appreciated)
another method is simply to extend your flash pages by placing indexable text below the animation. not often done simply because most designers who use flash love the look their getting, and feel it compromised art to add trailing text.
Also, you can replace the HTML used to embed the Flash movie with JavaScript:
<SCRIPT TYPE="text/JavaScript" LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="scripts/flashcode.js"></SCRIPT>
And then your script would be:
document.write("<OBJECT><PARAM1><PARAM2><EMBED> ...");
Or if you wanted to get really sneaky you could use variables, functions and if statements:
var object = "<OBJECT ...>";
var param1 = "<PARAM1 ...>";
var param2 = "<PARAM2 ...>";
var embedtag = "<EMBED ...">;
var endtags = "</EMBED></OBJECT>";
var start = 1;function start() {
if (start = 1) {
document.write(object + param1 + param2 + embedtag + endtags);
}
}
What if I attach a html page with the site and add all the contents in it just like we do it for site in frame?
BTW You can make flash pages w3c compliant which helps a lot - using Javascript to do this? Hmmm, no thanks ;-)
Ps It helps if the first thing that bots find in your body is a nice heading tag which mirrors your title tag. As Google is about off page factors mostly, and that Ink may soon be a huge player courtesy Yahoo, I would make that a H3 ;-)
Yup...that is true....but the better answers are here!
Just dump a load of HTML below the fold on numerous pages.....no one will ever look because they will be so impressed by the flash graphics.
I have a flash site that gets 1.4 million unique SE visitors per month....it doesn't do anything clever, it simply dumps the HTML below the page fold!
[edited by: heini at 10:27 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2003]
[edit reason] No urls please, thanks! [/edit]
it, might even be more elegant than the below the fold solution which sounds messy to me.
make it in HTML.
