Flash Navigation / Site Structure

Need advice on re-build of a group of sites.

[AlanF]

Lots of useful information here, which I'm ploughing through, but I have a couple of specific questions. I've been asked to look at some changes to our company's websites. We don't really have a webmaster, but it appears I've been volunteered.

First, our current sites use Flash to display our navigation options. For reasons unconnected with SEO, we're going to drop this and replace it with a more widely-available technology. But, I think we should now introduce SEO as a factor to consider. So, before repeating the same mistake again, should we also steer clear of Javascript / DHTML etc., or is this OK as long as we include a text version of our main navigation links in the page footer?

Second, we have a number of operating companies in our group. When we launched our current site, we set each of them up with their own site by making their 'home' page a second-level page in the group setup. For example, group home page of xyzcorp.com, with operating companies being xyzcorp.com/div1, xyzcorp.com/div2. They can therefore refer their contacts direct to their own 'home page'. Are there any implications in this for SEO?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[Sinner_G]

First: The spiders will find the links if they are also included as text version.

Second: xyzcorp.com/div1, xyzcorp.com/div2 will affect the PageRank of these companies, since many SEs rank your pages higher if they are on top hierarchical level. I would go for group at www.xyzcorp.com and the companies at div1.xyzcorp.com, div2.xyzcorp.com,...

[Marcia]

>div1.xyzcorp.com, div2.xyzcorp.com

With some setups, div1.xyzcorp.com would be mapped to xyzcorp.com/div1 and div2.xyzcorp.com to xyzcorp.com/div2

What effect would that have?