Just to chip in my 2 cents here, luminal. Admittedly, this information may be out of date, so parse it through your own personal nonsense filter before accepting or rejecting it.
Most search engines, while they have professed algorithms now to scour Flash based content, are much better at dealing with plain text and symantically correct HTML. In a lowest common denominator kind of way, if you browse your site with a text based browser like Lynx, what if anything will an end user see? That content is what the search engines will prefer to pick up, and is ultimately how you can gauge whether or not your site results will match your intent. What you are describing is using your Flash container as a kind of meta frameset, and including the contents dynamically via Flash links instead of actually linking to anything new or substantial. The $50 question is, if a user doesn't have Flash and doesn't have Javascript enabled, what kind of experience will they have? It's acceptable, although not universal to at minimum have some alt content that renders either the intent of the site with some generic links or maybe just a message that says, "Ah, so sad. No Flash, you fail. Please download some." However, the second message is the thing that many of your search spiders will see. Fast forward to the present day. My take is that if you're going to go through the trouble of creating content that is accessible via your Flash container, then it shouldn't be too much of a code add to support deep linking in your site, so that a user (and a search engine) can process the directive as a rational URL, even if behind the scenes it's just the same index.swf including dynamic content. So IMO, what you should be doing is coding a web page... perhaps in some scripting language such as PHP. Step 1: Either through mod_rewrite (if you're an Apache user) or some other tweaking of the web server, you tell the web server to "rewrite" all URLs at your domain to something like the following: http://domain.com/folder1/content1.html -----> http://domain.com/index.php?content=folder1/content1.html So by this, I mean that you configure your webserver to provide clean URLs for the end user... and your search engines. Step 2: Make sure that index.php does some parameter passing to your Flash movie, but also loads up the appropriate alt content so if a user doesn't have Flash, they still at least have the text and HTML that might make the experience semi-useful. Ideally, if your site is rationally constructed, you can reuse the content to drive both the alt content and the Flash content, but your mileage may vary depending on the user experience you are trying to provide. So in this sense you could definitely have your alt content in one file, but you should have some processing routine that "divvies" up that alt content so that only the right alt content shows when the user links to a specific "page" on the site. ===== The above is a little additional work, but based on what you described as your intended framework, it's not a huge price to pay, and it will make your site MUCH more accessible and search engine friendly/worthy of submission to the bots that be. Again, this may be outdated information, and if so I'll go back to research some more, but this is my understanding of a "best practice" scenario if you are trying to integrate Flash while still providing SEO friendly content. There are other ways of doing this, via templating systems and what-not, but that's way outside the scope of this discussion group, IMO. Hope this helps rather than confuses! No guarantees implied. :) Have a great day, and good luck! Vincent E. Polite On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:38 AM, luminal <[email protected]> wrote: > > First, the robots.txt tells google which pages to index or not. It > does not control the search resaults.. once google indexe a page it's > up to him if to show it or not in the search resaults... I think... > Second, I can not create only one SWF page for the content - it would > be very hard to update and less easy to handle. > > Therefore, I thought of inserting the alt content of the whole site in > the index.html, and again, I don't know if it's ok by google rules.. > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SWFObject" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/swfobject?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
