Need clarification please re: Flash & Meta

[autumn_whispers2me]

Okay, from what I understand, having a Flash presentation on an index.html page 'hides' it from search engines.. regardless of meta information??

Is there any way around this at all, and is there a trick to having both worlds---Flash presentation AND visibility on the web?

I'm not good enough with Flash yet to be able to create the "Flash/non-flash" static option index page. My "movies" are hardly more than simple animations at this point, so I think I'd just tick people off if I gave them that option and they chose the Flash page... lol They would most likely say, "What? I chose 'flash' for this?" I mean, it would be like expecting an explosion and getting little more than a brief fizzle. lol

Any suggestions/advice??

[Webforumz Staff]

Because Flash sites are located in SWF files and those files do not contain normal text, but instead a compressed format, search engines cannot read them.

However, when you 'publish' a Flash site from within Flash it creates an HTML file, with your embed code. Within the code you can find:

Code: Select all

Unfortunately Flash places them as HTML comments in order to hide them... I'm fairly certain that search engines will completly ignore HTML comments...

So the only option available to you is to create both an HTML and Flash version of your website if you want the search engines to index it. That is, in my opinion, the biggest drawback to using Flash. You need to be sure that you don't need visitors to come your way via the search engines...

I would suggest including Flash animations only where you have other HTML content.

[Rob]

Google not only indexes content within flash, but also follows links within flash (swf files)

It has been doing this for a while now.

[Webforumz Staff]

From my experience... it doesn't...

[Rob]

it's been do it for ages!!

It scores the results very low however so you rarely see them in SERPS.

[autumn_whispers2me]

So... in other words using meta tags in this instance (where flash is on the page without other content) is worthless, right?

Okay, how about this (just had an epiphany!): How about if I put text on the page under the flash movie, but use a font color the exact same color as the background so it doesn't 'show' on the page.... would that work? Would the search engines index the page correctly if I did that? In other words there would be text content on the page, but it wouldn't be 'visible' (hidden) to the eye.

[Webforumz Staff]

Originally Posted by autumn_whispers2me

Okay, how about this (just had an epiphany!): How about if I put text on the page under the flash movie, but use a font color the exact same color as the background so it doesn't 'show' on the page.... would that work? Would the search engines index the page correctly if I did that? In other words there would be text content on the page, but it wouldn't be 'visible' (hidden) to the eye.

What you're suggesting is actually banned by most search engines as many sites tried to do this to put invisible content on pages. Search engines are trying to index real content, for real people, so this is against that.

However, Rob has proven to me that google can pick out standard text and links from withint SWF files - so it seems safe to assume that any normal text within a SWF file will get indexed.

[autumn_whispers2me]

Hmmnn... that's weird. There's no text on the Flash movie, though. Oh well. C'est la vie. Guess we can't have it all, huh?

[Rob]

Well.....

Google can pick text out of a flash movie..... however, I am very doubtful it can distinguish between visible and invisible flash content.

It would be an interesting experiment to conduct purely because I like to know google inside out!

I am not for one minute suggesting you spam google via hidden flash content, as it would prolly treat repetitive text as spam just as it would in an html page. I doubt google would object to invisible content within flash that purely describes the flash file.... think of it as alt text.

[Rob]

See the following thread to get an idea of what content is seen when Google indexes Flash files (.swf)