Frontpage flash - crawling

#1

Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Could we get around the problem by having a div containing the same
links that the flash has, with display blok set to none so the content
of the div is not displayed to the user, but search engines should be
able to pick the links up from the div and crawl the site ?

Is this legal so to speak. don't want end up suggesting something that
will get the site banned :-).

Any hints will be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Saya

#2

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Saya <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> writing
in news:3bb1d0bd-89b5-452b-b024-3c2026d34cc7
@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com:

Quote:

Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Could we get around the problem by having a div containing the same
links that the flash has, with display blok set to none so the content
of the div is not displayed to the user, but search engines should be
able to pick the links up from the div and crawl the site ?

Is this legal so to speak. don't want end up suggesting something that
will get the site banned :-).

Any hints will be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Saya

What you really want to do is look up flash satay. Using the OBJECT
element, you can nest content that is not accessible to users without
flash, eg:

<object>
<img src="static image">
<ul>
<li><a href="links">Links</a></li>
</ul>
</object>

You will have to look up the relavent markup to do this.

You do not want to set an element to display none because it will not be
accessible either. IMHO display none should only be used for printing,
eg.
@media print{
div#menu {display:none}
}

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

#3

On Sat, 31 May 2008 10:49:42 -0700 (PDT), Saya <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>
wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Yup.

Quote:

Could we get around the problem by having a div containing the same
links that the flash has, with display blok set to none so the content
of the div is not displayed to the user, but search engines should be
able to pick the links up from the div and crawl the site ?

Make them visible. Put them in small fonts in the footer of the page.
The engines will see them there, they will also see that they are
freely visible so you won't get penalised for any kind of supposed
subterfuge, but your site visitors won't know they're there.

Quote:

Is this legal so to speak. don't want end up suggesting something that
will get the site banned :-).

Any hints will be greatly appreciated.

There you go. That's what I'd do. Have you got an <EMBED> tag in the
flash anywhere? Try sticking the links and any texts from the flash in
the <NOEMBED> too, that won't hurt either. Just don't get carried away
and put a load of extra stuff in there.

BB
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/
http://www.fat-odin.com/
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/

#4

On Sat, 31 May 2008 18:27:10 GMT, Adrienne Boswell <arbpen (AT) yahoo (DOT) com>
wrote:

Quote:

What you really want to do is look up flash satay. Using the OBJECT
element, you can nest content that is not accessible to users without
flash, eg:

object
img src="static image"
ul
li><a href="links">Links</a></li
/ul
/object

You will have to look up the relavent markup to do this.

You do not want to set an element to display none because it will not be
accessible either. IMHO display none should only be used for printing,
eg.
@media print{
div#menu {display:none}
}

Now you're all reminded why, when the last trump sounds, I've declared
dibs on Adrienne!

I did try this method with Flash years ago and it can be done too.
Takes ages and ages though.

BB :-)
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/
http://www.fat-odin.com/
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/

#5

Hi Adrienne,

Did you ever get my invite for the water cooler? If yes, sorry for this
spam. If not, and you're interested in the AISE forum, email me, thanks.

--
John Bokma http://johnbokma.com/

#6

"Saya" <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Quote:

Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Before you spend too much time on this I suggest checking whether this is
strictly true. Many (but not all) search engines are able to read Flash and
I expect they can extract the links too. If you download the Adobe Search
Engine SDK it contains a utility swf2html.exe which (amongst other things)
will dump out the links from a flash .swf file. If swf2html correctly
extracts all the links from your flash then I would expect the major search
engines to be able to do so too. So you may be worrying about all this for
nothing.

If for any reason you can't get hold of swf2html then let me know the url of
your site and I'll tell you what links can be seen.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian

#7

On Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:32:42 +0100, "Brian Cryer" <not.here@localhost>
wrote:

Quote:

"Saya" <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:3bb1d0bd-89b5-452b-b024-3c2026d34cc7 (AT) d45g2000hsc (DOT) googlegroups.com...
Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Before you spend too much time on this I suggest checking whether this is
strictly true. Many (but not all) search engines are able to read Flash and
I expect they can extract the links too.

Well, you'd be expecting wrong.

Quote:

If you download the Adobe Search
Engine SDK it contains a utility swf2html.exe which (amongst other things)
will dump out the links from a flash .swf file. If swf2html correctly
extracts all the links from your flash then I would expect the major search
engines to be able to do so too.

Nope; still wrong.

Quote:

So you may be worrying about all this for
nothing.

No, he's quite right to worry.

Quote:

If for any reason you can't get hold of swf2html then let me know the url of
your site and I'll tell you what links can be seen.

He'd be best off putting links into the site under the Flash in the
footer where they'll be clearly visible to the engines and the
visitors - but they won't be going down there looking for them. So
it'll be ok. Good call about the SDK but it never really caught on.

BB
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/
http://www.fat-odin.com/
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/

#8

"Big Bill" <bill (AT) kruse (DOT) co.uk> wrote

Quote:

On Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:32:42 +0100, "Brian Cryer" <not.here@localhost
wrote:

"Saya" <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:3bb1d0bd-89b5-452b-b024-3c2026d34cc7 (AT) d45g2000hsc (DOT) googlegroups.com...
Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Before you spend too much time on this I suggest checking whether this is
strictly true. Many (but not all) search engines are able to read Flash
and
I expect they can extract the links too.

Well, you'd be expecting wrong.

If you download the Adobe Search
Engine SDK it contains a utility swf2html.exe which (amongst other things)
will dump out the links from a flash .swf file. If swf2html correctly
extracts all the links from your flash then I would expect the major
search
engines to be able to do so too.

Nope; still wrong.

Try it.

Quote:

So you may be worrying about all this for
nothing.

No, he's quite right to worry.

If for any reason you can't get hold of swf2html then let me know the url
of
your site and I'll tell you what links can be seen.

He'd be best off putting links into the site under the Flash in the
footer where they'll be clearly visible to the engines and the
visitors - but they won't be going down there looking for them. So
it'll be ok. Good call about the SDK but it never really caught on.

No disagreement over it being better to have the links in plain HTML, and
personally I'd never design a site using Flash. However, some search engines
do use the SDK. Google for example does read Flash, whether it can extract
all the content is another matter since I doubt it can read anything that
uses ActionScript. The comment on
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-of-flash.html
probably acuratly sums it up: "All of this means that even if your Flash
content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.
Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet
spiders can."

So yes, better to use HTML, but the big search engines will make a go of
reading the Flash.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian

#9

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:23:51 +0100, "Brian Cryer" <not.here@localhost>
wrote:

Quote:

"Big Bill" <bill (AT) kruse (DOT) co.uk> wrote in message
news:b7gg44djh24h2m02gpbijml0d1rr2shh7d (AT) 4ax (DOT) com...
On Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:32:42 +0100, "Brian Cryer" <not.here@localhost
wrote:

"Saya" <vaqas (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:3bb1d0bd-89b5-452b-b024-3c2026d34cc7 (AT) d45g2000hsc (DOT) googlegroups.com...
Hi,

Our company has unfortunetely choosen to have a flash on the frontpage
that links into the site. Now I understand that this means the search
engine crawling mechanism will not be able to access the site and
crawl it because of the flash containing the links.

Before you spend too much time on this I suggest checking whether this is
strictly true. Many (but not all) search engines are able to read Flash
and
I expect they can extract the links too.

Well, you'd be expecting wrong.

If you download the Adobe Search
Engine SDK it contains a utility swf2html.exe which (amongst other things)
will dump out the links from a flash .swf file. If swf2html correctly
extracts all the links from your flash then I would expect the major
search
engines to be able to do so too.

Nope; still wrong.

Try it.

So you may be worrying about all this for
nothing.

No, he's quite right to worry.

If for any reason you can't get hold of swf2html then let me know the url
of
your site and I'll tell you what links can be seen.

He'd be best off putting links into the site under the Flash in the
footer where they'll be clearly visible to the engines and the
visitors - but they won't be going down there looking for them. So
it'll be ok. Good call about the SDK but it never really caught on.

No disagreement over it being better to have the links in plain HTML, and
personally I'd never design a site using Flash. However, some search engines
do use the SDK. Google for example does read Flash,

It has a vague stab at it. That's not the same as reads it. You want
engines to see Flash content, don't put it in Flash.

Quote:

whether it can extract
all the content is another matter since I doubt it can read anything that
uses ActionScript. The comment on
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-of-flash.html
probably acuratly sums it up: "All of this means that even if your Flash
content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.
Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet
spiders can."

So yes, better to use HTML, but the big search engines will make a go of
reading the Flash.

That isn't what it says, is it?

BB
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/
http://www.fat-odin.com/
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/

#10

Big Bill <bill (AT) kruse (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

Quote:

It has a vague stab at it. That's not the same as reads it.

No, it reads it, but (!) there are many ways to make text in Flash
unreadable (the same way putting headings in images without alt attributes
in HTML so to speak).

Examples:
http://www.google.com/search?q=filet...20skip%20intro

http://www.google.com/search?q=filet...%20index2.html

--
John Bokma http://johnbokma.com/
email me for water cooler invites...