regarding Flash website SEO

[Matty J]

knowing that search bots don't recognize text in graphical format, thus rendering flash websites virtually invisible to search engines, would it be possible, using CSS to basicly make 2 websites per page, one visible Flash page and 1 hidden page behind it?

(sorry about the run-on sentence)

by using (z-index and visible: false; ) tags to manipulate the page by putting the Flash site in front of an invisible webpage, with an appropriate amount of tags and contain enough applicable key words and links to basically be a search engine friendly version of the same website. or by making the text invisible in the CSS, does it also affect how it is intrepreted by bots?

thanx,

matty

[stymiee]

You could do this but you have two major issues with it:

1) It's twice the amount of work. Now you have two websites to maintain instead of one.

2) You risk the search engines considering you serving them up special content and banning for it. I wouldn't say this is certain to happen, but just the possibility of it makes the idea of trying it not very attractive.

The right way to handle this is to place alternative content in the tag as specified in the HTML standard. That way users who don't have flash can see this content instead. You can do a lot of what you want this way without risk of penalty.

If you have an all flash website you have to accept that you will be handicapped in the search engines. It's a trade off that the site owner has to accept when they decide they are going to go with an all flash website.

[roryt]

That is a good idea and i didn't ever think of that. I am pretty sure Bots would see the text because they aren't taking picture of the screen they are looking at your html files so if you have the text there somewhere then I am sure search engines will find out about it.

[etechsupport]

Also search engines are very fond of quality inbond links though it a flash site, I usually see few top flash sites that has tremendous traffic and rank well in most of the search engine.

[stymiee]

Also search engines are very fond of quality inbond links though it a flash site, I usually see few top flash sites that has tremendous traffic and rank well in most of the search engine.

That's the only real hope a flash site has. They need to get a heck of a lot of incoming links, quality ones at that, to hope to rank well at all. Flash sites have a slightly higher success rate of getting a successful viral campaign going because of the little tricks they can do with Flash but unfortunately most Flash sites don't really offer that "wow" factor or anything else to get a viral campaign started.

[etechsupport]

Stymiee, I agree with that. This reminded me this quote, I don't know who said this;
"Everyone can be an artist. Some of us paint with words, others with musical
notes. Some do it with equations while others use bricks and mortar.
And some even do it with paints. No matter what medium we use, if
we've poured our soul into it, the result is bound to be a masterpiece".