Hi.
Well, the thing is that the search engine robots index pages that it can read, and because the robots can't read inside a flash movie (i think google robot can now, but it kinda sucks at it, but that's pretty reasonable) they don't find text to read and relate the page, thus not indexing it.
There are various tricks, to solve this, none of them is "legal" -as far as I know-, but some of them are seem to work quite well.
One of the options is the one that you mentioned. Making two versions of the site, one in flash and one in html, woth the index containing a link to each one. The thing is, the robots take as more important de main page of your site (that is the index page) and if in your index page you only have two links, the rank won't be so good as if the important content were all in the main page.
Another option is, SE robots don't render javascript, so take advantage of this. Make your site in html, like any normal site, if your site reads information form a db or xml, output it out to the html with your prefered server side language, then with javascript, hide it and replace it with the swf.
There's a script that does this for you, is the SWFObject, it's kinda cool, here's the link
http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/
I've never tried it before, but as far as i read seems to be a good option.
Other techniques involve this same stuff with some slight differences, so I told you the best ones.
Hope you find it usefull.
Kind regards,
The_Nephilim
Hey
I am aware that if one builds their site in flash, there is serach engine optimisation incompatibilities. The search engine has a difficult time attempting to find a flash site, and the chances of it ranking highly are quite slim.
How do you recommend solving this problem?
I was thinking about (its just alot more work) developing two sites, both under the same name: only one in html, and one a flash, that way the search engine spiders can discover the html site, but users have the option of entering the much nicer flash site.
So, you have a splash page, with two options. One flash and one html.
Would this work?
4
