If you have a flash based site, can you include text on the z-axis via more traditional methods to make the content spiderable?
Visualize your web page. Navigation, header, background all there in flash. Then resting the text on the z-axis on top of the page so it looks like part of the presentation normally would for the web page, but the text is not served up in flash.
Clarification added 4 months ago:
Quick clarification. This is NOT for a black hat seo technique. I want the SEO benefit of drawing text out of the flash animation so it can be digested by the engines and look natural to the user.
Answers (8)
Dave M
The WireMan ★ Wire names created at events & parties ★ Fantastic trade show booth traffic builder ♫ WireNames.com
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Text is text. As long as you include it, it will get picked up...
Another practice is to create a div with your text in it, and use css to absolute position it to left: -1000; top: -1000;
This can help for search engines. If you actually have a static version of your website it can also help for screenreaders.
That being said... It's one of those "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" dilemmas.
Geoff F
"Hands-on" Software Architect and Senior Developer
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I'd be curious to see that.
I have the feeling that as the Flash run time proceeded with the animation, the z axis over that window would not be painted. by the time the repaint executed in the parent and propagated down, the lash would have painted something else in the animation.
An experiment would be interesting.
I'd have the HTML before the flash so the spider didn't stop on the flash, assuming there is nothing further of interest.
I would be cautious about placing unreadable text on your site. You could get penalized for that. I would place the text inside of a noscript tag:
<noscript>text....</noscript>
Hi Daryl,
I think that you are probably looking for something like this site http://bcfashionweek.com/index1.php?mode=cherish
The video is huge and you will probably have to wait a few moments to load, but that looks like what you are asking. Full screen flash and HTML on top of that. So, yes, I would say it is possible.
Links:
Randall G
Web Developer and Project Manager at netsperience
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I do not think placing relevant text off the page is bad for SEO and it is certainly good for accessibility.
Make sure you have a good meta description tag, because that is likely to be the blurb listed in the Google search results.
Also, text listed in ALT tags and in meta descriptions for elements: table summary etc may be useful for SEO.
If having trouble layering HTML over Flash, use the wmode="opaque" parameter (some say it affects the Flash performance, but it makes the layering possible). You can use DHTML to hide the layered text/html on page load, or change the wmode of the Flash-
Links:
Assuming you mean spiderable by Google you shouldn't have to do anything. Google can pick-up the text found in a flash-object.
You can read a lot more about it at the included link.
Links:
Google has altered its crawling methods to pick up text embedding in Flash movies, so I wondered worry. Just make sure you page titles, meta keywords and description is up to date and relevant.
