flash and google
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- itstimefortea
Hi,
This may have been covered already but I just wanted to ask if anyone has any tips for optimizing flash for google?Am I wrong in thinking that google is now able to read flash text? If so, what is the best format to have it in? Static or dynamic? Or does it matter?
I know flash is never going to be very search engine friendly but any advice would be very much appreciated - as always.
Cheers
- liveforever0
SWFobject
or the old skool Frameset
- itstimefortea0
yeah i'm using swfobject at the moment...
the site I'm working on is www.2detail.co.uk
it used to come up on top before but now its after dropping down for some reason... I was wondering if I'm using a dated version of swf object maybe.
Or... all the text in the site is outlined and if I went back and converted the text to either static or dynamic, would that help?
- tbh it works fine on my compliveforever
- yeah the site works fine.. just when you type '2detail' into google... you get my portfolio site and not their siteitstimefortea
- oh sos - cnt really help u there mate
liveforever
- Morning_star0
I know this is probably not what you want to hear but start again in html. After looking at the site, there doesn't seem to be anything that couldn't be done and you'll get far better search results.
- Nightshade0
I agree with Morning_star. An HTML site will be far better optimised for Google. If you want to use fancy fading/scrolling effects for the image slideshows you can always create small Flash movies and insert them into your HTML site. Or a lot of the fading/scrolling rollover effects could easily be recreated with Javascript/ JQuery.
- ian0
Well google indexes flash in a similar way to html, it reads the text and decides if the site is relevant to the search requirement. So having outlined text would affect how its treated by google.
On another note, if the text is all outlined, how do you update it if the client wants new copy or amends?
- this first statemtn shoudl also contain 'among other things' as its not just about text, but its a big part of it.ian
- cheers.. i think i should go back and fix the text in any case, and maybe also get them to do a sponsored link for 2detail maybeitstimefortea
- thanks for the adviceitstimefortea
- kingsteven0
Google "Flash SEO" ?
- jsaul0
I also agree with Morning_star , the same site could be produced in html with some nice jQuery scripting, that would put the O back in your SEO
- itstimefortea0
Thanks very much guys for all the helpful links and advice. I'm not really in a position to re-build it, but will certainly know better the next time I work on something similar.
- Warland0
With AS3 you could use XHTML as a data source, and javascript to bounce the flash site over top of the XHTML source site on that same page. Google won't know the difference.
There's a really good explanation here: http://evolve.reintroducing.com/…
- acescence0
the swfs that are loaded by the main swf don't get indexed, because google doesn't actually execute the code in the main swf that will load the others, so it doesn't know they exist.
as was pointed out in an article above, i usually put all the text in the movie as html text in the div that is swapped out by js for the flash content. that way, google sees the html text, and the user sees the flash.