[font=Times New Roman]Following on from my recent posting regarding the issues concerning Flash & search engine detection, from what I have read, the problem is still very much a concern for any web developers using Flash solely for site generation. [/font]
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[font=Times New Roman]The Macromedia SDK fix aimed at engine developers has met a very lukewarm response from all the major players, with a representative from one of the major engine sites saying that “The issue of enabling Flash generated sites to obtain higher ratings in our search engine is not a priority or even a concern to us.”[/font]
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[font=Times New Roman]Knowing all this & currently having a very irate customer demanding explanations & fixes as to why her web hosting company has told her that her flash generated site will not rank well on any engines & that the web development arm of their business would “Not touch Flash with an extended barge pole!” I have had to think on my feet.[/font]
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[font=Times New Roman]Apparently one known fix “Hidden CSS” is not very well thought of, so I was thinking along the lines of generating a spoof HTML page packed with Key terms, links & text that the engines love, either setting all content on the stage to invisible (or just setting text to the same color as my background) & then putting in a meta “Refresh” tag to direct to my site after, say a second.[/font]
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[font=Times New Roman]Not knowing that much about how search engines work would this solution be effective or would the engine just look at the meta tag first of & go straight down that route into the Flash site thus putting me back to square 1?[/font]
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[font=Times New Roman]I’m sorry to drag up what is probably a very old chestnut to the more established members of the forum, but I have spent a week trying to look into this issue & can only come up with, at best very confusing & contradictory advise. [/font]
Problem is that search engines penalize you for using meta refresh tags because it’s a common ploy used by the scumbags who set up sites with Britney Spears content or whatever, and then forward people to their **** sites or gateways.
I was using a meta refresh tags on a few of my sites simply for Flash detection, and I figured out that a couple of search engines wouldn’t even log them. But I’ve got a solution:
Put all of your keywords, relevant text, etc. on the index page of your site. Use the Detect for Flash template in the HTML publish settings of Flash. Create a graphic that says something like “flash is required to view this site, click here to download it, etc.” for people who fail the detection.
Then embed a small 1 x 1 swf on the page with a get url action at the 24th frame that sends people to your Flash index page. The reason you need to put it on the 24th frame is so that if someone clicks their back button to got ot a site they visited before yours, they won’t get stuck in a loop.
Thanks very much for the reply tactics, I’m sorry I didn’t reply sooner but I was expecting an e-mail notification of new posts from Kipura, which unfortunately didn’t happened.
Your reply was exactly what I needed to know, but… When you say - "Put all of your keywords, relevant text, etc. on the index page " Do you mean in the standard Meta tag fashion, as if it were a HTML doc?
I can’t quite understand how this technique gives you a benefit over people just simply coming directly to your site (apart from Flash detection) - You could put all the meta info on the main sites index page & it would be picked up the same by search engines as it would on your splash page?
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