Flash website optimization

[saikatblogger]

If I am asked to optimize a website that is built with Flash OR, has a lot of Flash Objects, what points would you suggest me to consider?

Point #1: Descriptive text inside the div that loads the Flash file.
Point #2: ?
Point #3: ?
.
.
.
Point #n: ?

[wige]

#2: Always provide alternatives. Don't rely on flash to present your important points. For example, if your navigation is done in flash, put a second navigation system at the bottom of the page for users who don't have flash installed/enabled, or in case the Flash breaks. This will also help the search engines crawl the site.

[Kamfor]

I had to optimize a full flash (one page) website which ranked poorly in Google. I made a few html pages with the text content of the flash pages, then placed links pointing to them from a noscript tag placed after the flash loading script on the flash page. The results came fast for the desired keywords but the client told me that he wants visitors to get to the flash page from the SERP, not to the html pages so I placed a javascript redirect (window.open) on every html pages which redirects the browser to the flash page. It works fine but I wonder if this solution is against Google's webmaster guidelines (hidden text, providing different content for the searchbots and the human visitors)?
In my opinion it is relevant alternative content - visitors can see it if their browsers not javascript enabled and the html pages are containing the same content as the flash page. Is Google thinking this way too?

[khurramali]

Originally Posted by Kamfor

(hidden text, providing different content for the searchbots and the human visitors)?
I. Is Google thinking this way too?

Problem with your approach is that you have no way to communicate your situation to Google. When Google spider catches these redirects they will automatically penalize your clients website before you know it.

They might contact you by email or through the webmaster console but by the description you have given in you post, I think the the algorithm will start penalizing your website one way or the other.

Can you afford to risk this? is my question.

[khurramali]

Originally Posted by saikatblogger

If I am asked to optimize a website that is built with Flash OR, has a lot of Flash Objects, what points would you suggest me to consider?

Point #1: Alternate HTML website is a must.

Point #2: link from the flash page to the html version of the site if the flash page is the home page of your website, you can also link to the site map so crawlers can easily find and index all your pages. Preferably the links should appear near the top section of that page.

Point #3: special care in Title Tag, meta description tag.

[Kamfor]

Originally Posted by khurramali

Problem with your approach is that you have no way to communicate your situation to Google. When Google spider catches these redirects they will automatically penalize your clients website before you know it.

They might contact you by email or through the webmaster console but by the description you have given in you post, I think the the algorithm will start penalizing your website one way or the other.

Can you afford to risk this? is my question.

I know I cannot explain my situation to Google and even if I could they wouldn't care about it
But I am not sure if the Google spiders are able to see javascript.
Is it worth to risk a penalty? That's a good question. From my perspective, no. But our client thinks differently... He wants to show his flash page to the visitors with boring music opening in a maximized browser window without browser toolbars - and he doesn't care with SEO rules. His keywords are quite competitive ones. His site wasn't listed in the top 100 before the html pages and I'm sure it wouldn't listed without html even if I'd point 200 good inbound links to his flash page.
So what can we risk? He wasn't listed and he won't if Google penalizes his website. Until then I can test how clever Googlebots are

However, if anyone has a good Google guideline-friendly solution for this situation, I'd be thankful to learn.

[wige]

Originally Posted by Kamfor

I know I cannot explain my situation to Google and even if I could they wouldn't care about it
But I am not sure if the Google spiders are able to see javascript.
Is it worth to risk a penalty? That's a good question. From my perspective, no. But our client thinks differently... He wants to show his flash page to the visitors with boring music opening in a maximized browser window without browser toolbars - and he doesn't care with SEO rules. His keywords are quite competitive ones. His site wasn't listed in the top 100 before the html pages and I'm sure it wouldn't listed without html even if I'd point 200 good inbound links to his flash page.
So what can we risk? He wasn't listed and he won't if Google penalizes his website. Until then I can test how clever Googlebots are

However, if anyone has a good Google guideline-friendly solution for this situation, I'd be thankful to learn.

This is not bad from an SEO standpoint. This is bad from EVERY standpoint. How do you feel when your are browsing from site to site and all of a sudden a window pops up, disables the normal browser functions and starts playing music? You close it, you leave, you never come back. In that order.

And what if the user has a slow connection or an older computer? Either they are forced to a page where they have to wait forever for the flash to load (ie, they leave and never come back) or they don't have flash and are forced to a page with no content and now no back button (in otherwords, they leave and never come back) but at least you still have the rest of the search engine traffic... although...

No, search engines don't process javascript - but they do check javascript. I have had links contained in javascript (document.write(<a href="someaddress">Click</a>)) discovered and indexed, but beyond that, the spider does not figure out what the scripts do, although the spider will look for redirect commands in the javascript as part of the spam detection process. And if it finds redirects, it can deindex the site.

So this is bad for your users, bad for the search engines, but I guess at least your client's site looks cool...

[Kamfor]

Originally Posted by wige

This is not bad from an SEO standpoint. This is bad from EVERY standpoint. How do you feel when your are browsing from site to site and all of a sudden a window pops up, disables the normal browser functions and starts playing music? You close it, you leave, you never come back...
...And what if the user has a slow connection or an older computer? Either they are forced to a page where they have to wait forever for the flash to load (ie, they leave and never come back) or they don't have flash and are forced to a page with no content and now no back button (in otherwords, they leave and never come back)...
...So this is bad for your users, bad for the search engines, but I guess at least your client's site looks cool...

I totally agree with you and I tried to explain it a zillion times to our clients... but they still want the full flash site with all the bells and whistles.
I have created the html version of this site under a different domain name with flash header and flash left navigation but with full html content and text links in the footer. It is a pixel-perfect copy of the full flash site with all the same behaviours except background music (the music would start again and again by opening the html pages and it is even more boring than the continuous music on the flash site) and it is displayed in a normal browser window, not a maximized one. The client was complaining about it, he wants maximized window and bg music...

This site generated another problem. The full flash site has a main navigation and a subnavigation on the bottom of each "page" like 3/1, 3/2, 3/3 displaying partial text contents to prevent scrolling. "Of course" the client wanted the html site to act the same way... So I "sliced" the content of each html page, placing them into individual divs and displaying only one div at a time to simulate the paging system of the flash site. The result is a html page with one visible div and a lot (there are 103 on one page!) of hidden divs (display:none). Showing/hiding divs is done by javascript of course.
Another big no-no by the google guidelines... it looks like 98% of the text on the page were hidden text...

But again, I couldn't find a better solution to solve the client's needs - anybody have better ideas?

[wige]

I think in a situation like this, I would ask the client what the goal of his site was - does he want bells and whistles to show off, or does he want customers buying his products to stay in business? Because in this particular case, it seems like it would be one or the other.

If his goal is to show off, SEO really doesn't matter because visitors will hate the site anyway (if you can, check the bounce rate of the site, might be a good way to prove your point) and search engines will spam flag it.

[Kamfor]

Well, he thinks design can convert visitors into buyers (he has a dental clinic). He does not really worried about SEO - he runs an AdWords campaign and some other online/offline advertising campaigns. He says if we can drive more traffic to his website from the left side of the SERP it is fine - if not, no problem, AdWords will do it from the right...

[wige]

So what is his conversion rate, and what is the bounce rate?

[Kamfor]

The bounce rate is 21.83% - of course it was 100% while his site contained only the single full flash page.
There's no conversion rate because there are no goals set up in Analytics.
He gets 41% of his traffic from Google which is not too high but it was about 5% before the html subpages. Interestingly, Analytics displays 0 paid visits via Google so I wonder if he really runs an AdWords campaign... I did not check it, he just told it to us.

[chandrika]

Could you put the standard html content further down page, so that it was there on the flash pages to be spidered, but people arriving at the page would see the flash only unless they scrolled down?

[Traffic Master]

Good point, chandrika.

[Kamfor]

No, our client does not allow scrollable content, not even on the full html site...

[chandrika]

You could use javascript to detect whether visiting browser can view flash, and do an if yes view flash, if no view html solution. That way bots that generally cant view flash will be directed to html, flash viewers will get the flash site. SE will spider and list content, but pages listed will still be seen as flash by visitors who can view flash.

Read a bit more detail here...

How to SEO Flash - Jonathan Hochman

[Kamfor]

Useful article, thank you chandrika!

[kgun]

Here are some other:

Adobe - Player Licensing : Search Engine SDK FAQ

Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines

Flash, SEO and Optimization - How To Properly Use Flash On Your Websites

SWF Metadata in Flash 8

[Kamfor]

Thanks kgun!

[hawash]

maybe site map will help in this

[saikatblogger]

Thanks to all of you for your time and input. I have found another good article, just wanted to share with you all.

Flash and Search Engine Optimization - UGN

[saikatblogger]

Google SEO and Flash

This article has used swf2HTML tool to show how accurately Google reads SWF. I found it interesting!