[thelist] Search Engines and Flash

Andrew Clover and at doxdesk.com
Thu Jan 24 07:21:58 CST 2002


Janet Green <JGreen at desmoinesmetro.com> wrote:

> I'm wondering how the use of an opening Flash animation page [...]
> impacts a site's placement in search engine results.

As long as you include a plain HTML link to the 'real' main content page
in the splash screen document you should be okay. Spiders can't really
do anything with a .swf, but they'll happily follow a link to a
a page full of that juicy HTML content search engines just love.

The only possible problem with this is with engines that rank popularity
by linkage. If everyone links to your splash page but the search engine
likes the index page better, you may lose a little in placement, since
the index page is only indirectly linked to all those other sites, through
the splash page. I don't know how much of an effect this would have, you
might have to ask a Google insider. :-)

The other approach is to pepper the splash page with non-visible bait text.
This can be tricky because so many sites abuse this approach that some
search engines deliberately check for some of the signs of it (eg. repeated
text, <font size="1">...) and penalise the page (or don't index it at all).

> Visit www.desmoinesmetro.com 

If this is the site you're talking about, I'd say it's fine. Looks good too.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/




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