Jason-
Sorry for the late response! As you already know, talking about Flash
and SEO can cause important conversations, and the same holds true
here at Google. However, after soliciting the help of the inimitable
Adam Lasnik and Greg Grothaus (et al.), I hope the following can clear
up the running questions:
The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to
ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot.
However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster's
intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text
means webspam--e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably
not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords
are more likely to indicate webspam.
I bring this up because, although your method is hiding text behind a
very pretty Flash animation, you are still presenting the same content
to both the user and the search engine, and offering it through
different media. This should not harm your search rankings.
However, Beussery raised a very good point when he said "Content in
plain view is golden." If ever your SWFObject were to display an
"ElephantCo Car Trunks" logo while the standard HTML version was
showing "ElephantCo Car Trunks--well suited to every vehicle from
Altima to Z4!" then you would have stumbled into the realm of hiding
text to modify search behavior, and have crossed over the black-hat
line.
I've looked over your example site, http://www.blitzagency.com/ and I
like what I've seen. As you describe them, your methods are not
trying to fool users or Search Engines, which means a good experience
for both. Although the HTML versions of your pages are not always
very user-friendly, e.g. visiting http://www.blitzagency.com/clients.html
with javascript disabled loses the categorization and images
associated shown in the flash version.
The only concern I have is where links to your site will be pointing
and what the link text may say. Googlebot deals with #anchors
differently than ?arguments. Googlebot treats ?arguments as strict
part of the URL string, but ignores #anchors, since in normal HTML,
they all point to the same page...
Because your (very ingenious) navigation scheme relies on #anchors and
then dynamically loads the content in flash, the pages people go to
might . A link pointing to http://www.blitzagency.com/aboutUs.html#clients
should send pagerank to /aboutUs.html , though the text in the link
may be associated with the content in clients.html. You could try to
stop this by including "Link to this page" buttons to encourage
linking with an #anchor-free URLs.
Hope this clarifies things-
-Bergy
On Jul 11, 8:50 pm, Jason Grunstra wrote:
> Actually sIFR only alters the font that is seen by the user. Search
> engines don't see fonts. They see text.
> >From the sIFR site on how it works:
> 1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
> 2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is
> installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you
> designate.
> 3. If Flash isn't installed (or obviously if javascript is turned
> off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs.
> If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your
> page measuring each element you've designated as something you'd like
> "sIFRed".
> 4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same
> dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping
> the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
> 5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in
> your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits
> snugly inside the Flash movie.
> So sIFR uses the _DATA_ in an (X)HTML tag to inject that data into
> Flash, which then displays that SAME EXACT DATA in Flash.
> How is that any different than using (X)HTML data as a data source for
> an entire Flash website?
> So for example:
> sIFR input: <h1>Hello World!</h1>
> sIFR Flash output: Hello World!
> SWFObject input: <h1>Hello World!</h1><p>This is my website.</
> p><p>Thanks for visiting.</p>
> SWFObject Flash output: Hello World! This is my website. Thanks for
> visiting.
> So you see, they really are no different.
> I could easily write some javascript to pass the innerHTML of my pages
> main div element into the Flash as a parameter which would then use
> that XML (XHTML == XML) to render the content in Flash. But it would
> just be an unnecessary step since that same content is already being
> pulled in by Flash.
> On Jul 11, 2:27 pm, beussery wrote:
> > "Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be
> > perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search
> > engines differently than to visitors."http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
> > Content in plain view is golden!
> > sIFR alters the font of text seen by both the search engine and the
> > user. SWFObject uses the DIV to hide text from users with Flash.
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