Index page is flash. What's the best way to handle site?

Flash page handling

[astoller]

A new site I have has flash as the index page.
Obviously no use for crawling.
Next page on prodcuts, is html.

So do I focus all my requests for links and all site submissions to engines, to this products page?

[rfgdxm1]

Why annoying your site users, along with the spiders, with a junk flash home page? Usually enough to make me bail out of a site as soon as I see something like that.

[mat]

Me too.

What's the best way to handle site?

... dump it or make it an option - click here to see an annoying vanity piece.

[lazerzubb]

Interesting Thread about this [webmasterworld.com]

I would say request the links for the main page, you will never be sure if you will continue to have flash there.
And give the flash page a second though, is it really necessary to have it?
Does it help the user, is it user friendly etc.

[djgreg]

To answer your question:
It shouldn_t be very complicated to put a little VISIBLE text above your flash film and explain with some keywords what your site is about.
Then you could put a link on the index.html which sais SKIP INTRO and link it to your products page. Every spider will follow this link so your whole project gets indexed.
But I would let the links from other sites point to my www.mydomain.com because this is better in ranking than a www.domain.com/folder . Besides this you are easily able to adjust the text above the flash film whenever you want.

greg

[Macguru]

Personally, I also feel a Flash intro is a major mistake. The heavier it is or the longuer it lasts, the less visitors will stay. I have sites with homepages offering both a HTML and a flash version of site. I am not surprised to see that less than 20 % of users pick the flash version.

I understand your site only uses an intro, lets focus on that.

djgreg has a nice option, if you have to live with the intro. I have another to suggest. I the client cant part with it, why not make a home page filled with goodies (ŕ la doorway) and put and external JS window.replace redirect to the flash intro?

Lets say your doorway is index.htm, your intro is index_2.htm and what would ideally be the real homepage is index_3.htm. Make the big "click me to enter" graphic on index.htm link directly to index_3.htm. People surfing with JS disabled probably dont want to see the intro.

Finally, dont miss the Everything you wanted to know about Flash, but was afraid to ask [webmasterworld.com], thread by korkus2000. Its all there.

[Sinner_G]

Guess I don't have to write what I think about flash homepage, see all of the above.

If you really have to stick with it, you could use the <noscript> tag to put some useful information which only spiders and users not reading js will see.

[astoller]

djgreg
How would this be?
I part optimise the index flash page with visible text above the flash as you suggest.
Then I could insert two “skip intro” links.
eg. skip to product 1.htm and skip to product 2.htm
Then these 2 product pages could be totally flashless and be crawled well.

Macguru
What does an external JS window.replace command do?
Trouble is, existing flash page is also functional as it has JS links to other pages.
So my new ideal homepage would really starty hacking up their design.

Sinner G
What does the <noscript> tag do and where would I put it?

[Macguru]

>>What does an external JS window.replace command do?

Search engines dont read Javascripts, but 91% of browsers do. Spiders will see your doorway as the index page, read text and follow links from it. 91 % of browsers will be redirected to the intro. 9 % will click to enter.

>>Trouble is, existing flash page is also functional as it has JS links to other pages.

As I mentionned before, search engine spiders wont parse JavaScripts, so they wont follow these "links".

>>So my new ideal homepage would really starty hacking up their design.

If the client can't survive without the intro, do your ideal homepage and redirect it to the intro.

[djgreg]

astoller:

you got it. That is the way I did it when I was used to put silly flash intros on my websites. And it worked very well, robot follows the skip intro link and can crawl the page.
It is not necessar that the pages product1 and product2 are totally flashless , only the links and major text should be in html. There can still be flash animations, e.g. showing your products in a slide show or somethig.

[Macguru]

The later technique will not make your site benefit from text and links on homepage.
I was just trying to reply to : What's the best way to handle site?

[Sinner_G]

What does the <noscript> tag do and where would I put it?

As its name says, the noscript tag includes content for agents that don't read scripts, i.e. Javascript. So what you do is have it somewhere in the body of your document. Something like:

<body>
<!--Insert your flash here-->
<noscript>
<!--Insert links to other pages or text content here-->
</noscript>
</body>

[astoller]

I'd like to thank all of you for your contributions and ideas.
This has been very educational for me.

Arthur