Confused about search indexing for my flash site

My website that I am creating for a client is at www.shenlegal.com. I use flash for navagation due to the large amount of links available from the front page. I have had a hard time getting good search engine results, and I posted some questions about rankings and indexing on another board. They told me that my biggest problem is that I use flash for navagation. I have put in the proper meta tags and what not and nothing really seems to be working, so is this really the case? Is it possible to use flash for site navagation and still get good search engine results? Thank you for any help...

Most search engines do not index anything
that's in the SWF format. Therefore, the
links in your navigation aren't being
spidered.

Regards,
Venio

so, it is probably adviseable that I not use flash for navagation if I want to get good search indexing?? should I scrap the flash and just use html links somehow?

My suggestion would be to keep the flash navigation.


Then at the bottom of the page or to the
side, have small html links to link to the
same pages as well. The search engines
will spider through these links.

Perhaps you could put all the links in HTML in a division and just set it's CSS display property to none. The links wouldn't show up in the browser and the spiders can still follow them in the source.

Cali

Quote:

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Originally posted by Caligula
Perhaps you could put all the links in HTML in a division and just set it's CSS display property to none. The links wouldn't show up in the browser and the spiders can still follow them in the source.

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yes yes

VAMP'S FREEBIE OF THE DAY


create a site map and on that page put all your links on it submit that page,,, flash won't get spidered

Quote:

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Originally posted by Caligula
Perhaps you could put all the links in HTML in a division and just set it's CSS display property to none. The links wouldn't show up in the browser and the spiders can still follow them in the source.

Cali

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thats a old trick and can get you banned from search engines,,i know i have had sites banned....

^about to post that

trying to trick the search engine will get you nothing except bad things from them. the best thing you could do is to get rid of flash navigation. if it is completely necessary, at least provide an html alternative not only for search engines but for those without the flash plugin or on slow connections. A sitemap is useful if you have many subpages that would require a lot of digging to get to, and might otherwise be missed. For most sites, text links are the best option.

Interesting that doing what I suggest would be considered a bannable offence. Why is this? Just seemed like a logical solutions to me. What protest could they have about valid links that are already present in the Flash menu?

On second thoughts though, I suppose I can see how an approach like that could be abused. Shame that anyone wanting to use a practical solution for an innocent purpose would get punished. Oh well.

Cali

search engines are designed to find relevant content. if what you provide to the search engines is not available to a normal surfer then it is considered spam. it has no way of knowing that those links are inside the flash movie. it sees the flash movie as one big object, like a jpg.

Create a small html page that links to a page full of 'valid' links. On this small page, put a small swf which will simply calls for your swf menu page. if flash isn't installed, the user will use the link(s) on this small page to acces your pages.

With a bit of careful design, coding, and site navigation, the non-flash users will be unaware and unconcerned that they don't have flash installed because you can design around this at the same time as catering for those that do.

And as a bonus, search engines will be happy.

If you have problems conceptualising how to work around search engines being unable to index your swf links, I recommend you learn about what search engines you want to submit your site to, and read there requirements 'carefully' and 'thoroughly'.

As far as metatags etc . . . for example, if you register with google for advertising, new legislation requires it to be in their interest to actually physically validate your links and adwords to be sure your site is free from spam links and popups etc.

Good luck.

I do have a sitemap created and linked at the bottom of each page. This site map uses the flash links (although I can easily take that part out) but then lists all of the same links in HTML. Should I be submitting that file the search engines and not my index.html file? Or should I have a link to the sitemap listed first and foremost before the flash files so that engines can get the links at the top of my page? If my sitemap already appears on all of my pages, should the spiders be able to read the sitemap as it is now?

If I really need to I will get rid of the flash links, but it just seems like there has to be a way around this. I know I've seen other flash sites indexed well. I'd like to keep the current design if it is possible to get good indexing as is.