SEOing
A Flash Intro
By Vaclav
Mach
Introduction
Why
does a FLASH intro need SEO? Flash, the great SE killer, is basically
nonspiderable, although there are reports of the opposite. In
this way, the intro creates a solid, non-permeable barrier between
the website and the external world. One way around is to place
the intro into a frame and connect the other pages via links from
the [noframes] tag. The SE will follow such links, but will not
place much weight on the anchor text or any keywords within the
[noframes] tag. In this way, the index page is practically lost
for most SEO purposes. A tremendous waste, if you consider that,
from the SEO viewpoint, the index is the most valuable page of
your entire website. For example, it is significantly easier to
obtain external links pointing to the index page.
Using
frames is definitely a very bad option. The very best action is
to talk the website owner into removing the FLASH intro at all.
Even
offering a small discount is worth the expenses. But unfortunately,
most business ownners are completely fascinated by the idea of
their logo bouncing around the screen, changing colors and doing
other rather annoying things. This is where the real SEO comes
into the play.
Just
to make things clear. I sort of like FLASH. I agree that it is
a killer tool for webdesign - if used properly. But I do not think
that an intro is a proper usage for this technology.
Planning
Traditionally,
cloaking is based on simple principles.
-
Identify
the visitor on the basis of the user agent or (better) its
IP address.
-
Serve different content to SE and human.
Here
we will use somehow different and as I believe, more gentle principles:
-
Find if the client accept FLASH (Google does not).
-
Serve
the same page to both types of clients. The only difference:
the FLASH accepting clients will get the real content of the
page overlayed by the FLASH layer. Pressing the STOP button
will remove the flash layer, revealing the actual content
of the page.
Implementation
You
will find a working example at our
webdesign site. There you will also find the links for downloading
the source code of index.php, flash intro and switch.php.
index.php
This
is the page containing the FLASH intro. The FLASH object is contained
within a [div] tag with a high Z index and will therefore overlay
the actual text placed into the underlying [div] tag.
Flash
intro itself
The
only requirement is that the STOP button points to the page switch.php
switch.php
After
the STOP button is pressed the script in switch.php is executed.
The script will register a session variable intro
ensuring that the intro will not be played again. Calling the
script again through the play intro link will reverse
the situation.
Problems
-
The
example above uses sessions for preserving the state information.
Sessions are usually stored in cookies. Thus clients with
disabled cookies will not be able to escape from the FLASH
movie. A simple remedy is to store the state in both a session
and _GET variable. You may also consider propagating the session
in the url, by setting session.use_trans_sid=1 in the php.ini
file. This problem will not affect the SE. They will not be
served with the FLASH. Even if they are, they will see the
real page content and will not press the STOP button to start
the session.
-
A minority of FLASH enabled clients will not admit the ability
to interpret FLASH in the content of $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"]
variable and will not see the intro. Not a real tragedy. In
fact you may decide to serve the FLASH uniformly, to all type
of clients. The SE will see the real content immediatelly,
the human users after clicking the STOP button.
Vaclav
Mach is owner of the Scisoft
webdesign - a website visibility and accessibility oriented
company.
Article
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
