Flash, the great SE killer, is actually nonspiderable, although there are reports
of the opposite. In this way, the intro creates a webdesign agentur good, non-permeable barrier
between the web site and the external world. One of the ways around is to put the intro into a frame and connect one other pages via links from the [noframes] tag.
The SE will follow such links, but won’t place much weight on the anchor
text or any keywords within the [noframes] tag. In this way,
the index page is practically lost for some SEO purposes.
A tremendous waste, if you consider that, from the SEO viewpoint,
the index is probably the most valuable page of your complete website.
For example, it’s significantly easier to obtain external links pointing to the index page.
Using frames is definitely a very bad option.
The most effective action is to talk the web site owner into removing the FLASH intro at all.
Even supplying a small discount may be worth the expenses. But unfortunately, most business ownners are completely fascinated by the notion of their logo bouncing around the screen, changing colors and doing other rather annoying things.
That is where the true SEO comes into the play.
Just to make things clear. I sort of like FLASH. I agree so it is
a monster tool for webdesign – if used properly. But I don’t think that
an intro is a proper usage because of this technology.
Planning
Traditionally, cloaking is based on simple principles.
- Identify the visitor on the cornerstone of an individual 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 exactly the same page to both forms of clients. The only difference: the FLASH accepting clients can get the true 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 see an operating example at our webdesign site. There you may also find the links for downloading the source code of index.php, flash intro and switch.php.
index.php
Here is the page containing the FLASH intro. The FLASH object is contained inside a [div]
tag with a top Z index and will therefore overlay the actual text placed to the webdesign agentur 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 program variable intro ensuring that the intro won’t be played again. Calling the script again through the play intro link will reverse the situation.
Problems
- The example above uses sessions for preserving their state information. Sessions are often stored in cookies. Thus clients with disabled cookies won’t have the ability to escape from the FLASH movie. An easy remedy is to store their state in both a program 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 won’t affect the SE. They’ll not be served with the FLASH. Even if they are, they will see the true page content and won’t press the STOP button to begin the session.
- A community of FLASH enabled clients won’t admit the capability to interpret FLASH in the content of $_SERVER[“HTTP_ACCEPT”] variable and won’t begin to see the intro. Not really a real tragedy. Actually you may decide to serve the FLASH uniformly, to all type of clients. The SE might find the true content immediatelly, the human users after clicking the STOP button.