SEO Tricks for Flash

I have heard for a while that Flash doesnt do well as a base for a website that focuses on SEO because spiders do not access the flash.

However, I was wondering if CSS was used in conjunction with flash if that would be considered spammy. Please let me know what you think of my idea.

1) include all content that is located in the flash as html within the index.html page and wrap it in a #container div.

2) Make sure the html is well suited for SEO with heirarchy, keywords, anchors and so on...

3) in the stylesheet set #container{display:none;}

4) Embed flash below the container div in the body of the index.html page.

Do you guys think this approach would be successful for spidering the site? Please let me know your thoughts and if you know of any resources or tests that would contain some additional information.

well, first of all I'll have to warn you that you're getting awfully close to bad seo, and by that I mean that you can get penalised and even removed from googles index if someone were to tip the good people at google off about it. Although that techniqe was semi-ok a year or two back.

It's pretty much considdered the same thing as using white text on white background or loading a frameset with a 1 pixel border and jam it with keywords or any other shady method. Ie its cheating and its just a silly thing to do...I mean you want to optimise your site so that you get traffic, right? Well, the more traffic you get the bigger risk you run of getting reported to google.

So to answer your question: Yes, your method would work and the page would get spidered until you got caught, so try to think of some other white hat way of doing it, like maybe landingpages.

I understand that it is shady to hide such things but is there a possibility of changing the CSS "display" attribute to none when flash is installed or changing to "display:block" when flash is not installed or is disabled, that way users are able to see your site whether or not they have flash and the content is in your html markup for spiders.

Im not trying to have a spam site, I just want to provide a well designed flash site that markets well and is optimized.

What Im thinking is a Java variation which is present when flash is not available. An example is this:



But instead, the entire html code for the page would be present.

It's fine with me as long as you don't flood it with keywords. You will be penalize if you put to much density on it.

I dont feel that you should add any hidden text. It could land your website in trouble.

However you can add two links on your homepage.

a) View our Flash Site
b) View our static site

This will help those users who do not have flash installed. Moreover it will help search engines to navigate your content without much trouble.

Your static site should have same design as that of flash version ( minus animation). This will be helpful for both visitors as well as search engines.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

hi,

trick is good if, it is fair and not hidden to the visitors. This is not a big thing how search engine friendly your site is, this is also very essential to know whether your site is safe or not.By using tricks if you are inviting the trouble then i don't think it's a great trick

You know what would be a better idea?

Create static pages that have the same content as your flash pages. Create a static site map which is linked somewhere on your footer (so the SERPs can find it) and link to all of the static pages from here.

That way, few visitors will ever see these pages - but the search engines can read the text. You can even place a promient link at the top of each page with a "View our Flash site" label so that visitors who land on these pages can actually see the real site.

That way, you're not fooling the SERPs. Using CSS in any way other than displaying text for the visitor to *see* is just walking a thin, dangerous line.

i have read many places that crawler is reading the text in flash file. i have also did the experiment and got success in that. you can search by you text in flash file in google and you will find you site over there.