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Senior Member
SEO again..
ok so you have this..
A site built entirely with Flash suffers a great disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash "page," and install the Flash movie on each and every one of the HTML pages. When a visitor requests the page, they'll see Flash if they can handle it. Otherwise, a non-Flash visitor, such as a search engine, will be able to spider the site. If a user follows a search result onto one of the inner pages, they'll get the same Flash experience because the movie is available on every page
ok cool, but what i'm confused about is, that I keep reading that google for example DOES index .swf's. So what if you create this great system that stuff's all this content onto the page, and the spider just parses the .swf anyway (and misses all the dynamic content inside it).
??
boombanguk
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Flashkit historian
Hi,
Boardroom question.
Thread Moved
Frets
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Bearded (M|G)od
The best way really that I've found is to use a plain-text version of the website behind the Flash site. That makes it nice and search engine friendly. If you want to take a look at what I mean, look at my site, http://www.ydekproductions.com. If you view the source, you will see exactly what a web crawler sees. All of the content from the Flash site, in basic HTML form. As for dynamic content, you can do the same thing. Have a php file create the raw HTML version of the site as well.
Google does now crawl .swf files, but I wouldn't rely on that. My site shows up because of the text hidden, not from my .swf file.
I hope this helps you out!
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Senior Member
thanks for the info.
But how would I go about making the php create a html version of my dynamic content?
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Bearded (M|G)od
PHP is a scripting language mainly used for developing dynamic content. It's good for interaction between a database.
So maybe I'm misinterpreting your meaning of dynamic content? What exactly on your site is dynamic? Is it content loaded from an XML file?
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Senior Member
my current site is www.flashculture.com
I want to convert that to a Flash site, with all the content being stored in a mysql database. But I want it to be SEF, so I want the php to also create a html version (which only the spiders can see) of the content, which sits on the same page the Flash website is on.
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Bearded (M|G)od
Well, if you are planning on storing the content in a database, you will need to learn some server-side scripting language. Whether it be PHP, ASP, Java, Ruby, etc, it really doesn't matter, and I'm not going to teach exactly how to do that. But if you learn how to query information from a database, you shouldn't have any problem creating a simple html structure of the site as well for SEO reasons.
For an example of how the spider crawled my site, look here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...ns&btnG=Search Disregard the first result because that is for the old site, and for some reason, it is still cached with Google. But the second result is how my site looks to Google.
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Senior Member
I know php to a certain extent, just no experience with using it with Html, usually I just use it to get data to and from Flash direct.
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Bearded (M|G)od
It's honestly extremely similar. It's just a matter of printing out the data.
Code:
<html><body><?php $var = 'my string'; echo $var; ?></body></html>
That's php and html mixed.
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tell me, is this sellable.....
i think what the OP is talking about is sometihng called clocking.
you serve on type of content to your human visitors, and to the spiders you serve teh easier to read html.
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up to my .as in code
 Originally Posted by Boombanguk
thanks for the info.
But how would I go about making the php create a html version of my dynamic content?
That wholly depends on how comfortable you are with php. Something like this is not usually found in a pre-canned tutorial or example and is made to order.
Like a couple of other guys in here, I also use MySQL for storage (Flex 2 blog system) and wanted a text only version also (basically the same content delivered as w3c compliant html). It's on me to build it and what I ultimately ended up with is everytime I write a new article, or add an affiliate link or new site page link in my Flex based admin panel, it saves the data to mySQL and also rewrites the html content version on the fly:
html version:
http://www.flex-fanatic.com
flex 2 version
http://www.flex-fanatic.com/index2.html
I could have used a detection script as my root and switched modes on the fly (show alternate content if no flash9 plugin detected) but didn't want any embed code in my index page so now flash is the option and w3c html is the default. Since users cannot submit comments nor view comments nor view running Flex examples in articles nor download files attached to articles unless they enter the Flex version, I still end up with a ton of users entering the Flex version (completely by their choice to do so) .
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Senior Member
"ended up with is everytime I write a new article, or add an affiliate link or new site page link in my Flex based admin panel, it saves the data to mySQL and also rewrites the html content version on the fly"
thats exactly what I'm going to try to create, but what i'm slightly confused about is, I thought the html version of the site was meant to basically be "invisible", and would never be seen. The reason Im saying that is its going to be enough trouble getting the php to output the correct data to create the right html page with the right data in it, apart from having that html page actually look nice! 
also I don't understand this bit
"I could have used a detection script as my root and switched modes on the fly "
you mean javascript? what would be wrong with having the JS code in the index page? because I thought thats what I was going to have to do, get my php to output some JS code to load in the .swf.
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Senior Member
You should be using the right tools for the job and you should never be driven by your tools. Imagine the data driving the site rather than the tools and language.
Your flash culture site seems to have a lot of links to text based content which works well. In your situation, you should think of data and presentation over tools.
I.e on your homepage, the news articles section is textual and is displayed as a series of links. This is information that is displayed perfectly as it is. You could create a flash ticker that scrolls the information but you have to view how users and search engines view it.
search engines could potentially ignore it or regard it lower than normal text links
users could get annoyed that they cannot click directly to the link they want.
Instead of thinking about how to build your site in flash, try thinking about how you could improve your site with flash. An example:
http://www.flashculture.com/bestwebsites.htm
Why not have the previews inside one flash movie which expands to show more detail and potentially gives the user some information about the author / site.
What I would suggest is that even though your site is a flash resource / news site, check out the content. It is perfect for text delivery. It gives the information to the user brilliantly and simply. Don't confuse this for the sake of it.
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Senior Member
thats for the advice. I understand what you are saying, but this whole thing came about because I wanted an easier way to update my site. I looked at mambo etc, but they still seemed a lot of messing around, so I decided to use the Flash expertise I have to create a new site with a simple admin for me to update it with. The only issue was indexing, which is why I asked about the background html version . I would still prefer to go with a 100% Flash site. I think it can be made just as usable as a html site, with Flash 8.
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up to my .as in code
No...I'm saying my html version could have been used as alternate content for instance if the user did not have FP9 installed with detection. Instead I simply wanted my main index page to be as friendly as possible (no embed code at all) and just have it represent (as best it could) the same data that is inside the Flex version. Although I use the Flex version almost exclusively myself...it really doesn't matter to me what version is the front door as long as I don't have to write two seperate versions of everything and I'm SEO friendly. After only a week I'm already finally beginning to hit the radar.
Everything written inside the Flex blogger is written with a custom RTE (like yourself) in my admin panel and the articles are stored in their native Flash formatted html (textarea tagging) and I can edit existing articles by calling them up from the database in that same enviro. This way the admin RTE when editing existing content picks right back up on the textarea tagging when I load one up and links are already formatted...bold text...bulleted lists...etc etc just like when I originally wrote them. The most work involved was building that custom backside to write the html version and filter that data and stripout the flash formatting and replace it on the fly into standard html tagging while still representing it in the same general way as the Flex version does. Now it reads it...filters it...rewrites it as compliant html every time I tell it to in admin. It pretty much builds itself now....I just focus on the Flex version (where I always did anyway) and have fun
Last edited by Chris_Seahorn; 05-21-2007 at 10:03 PM.
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Senior Member
thanks for all the info above. I think I've changed my mind about how to do the new version of FC about 5 times over the past few weeks, going from "shall I do it all in Flash?" to "it has to be html!", to "how about a Flash/html/php hybridd!".
About 60% of my page hits right now come through google, so its very important to me that I keep that aspect of promotion going.
one thing I was curious about is sitemaps? would it be possible for me to create the site in Flash(or certain parts) but build the sitemap dynamically from the data thats in the mysql database? so the user sees the Flash, and I create a sitemap of all the links for the spiders to follow? would that work well?
The only thing that bothers me about that approach is that google says they still try to index your website the "normal" way even if you do have a sitemap, so i'm not sure how useful a sitemap really is!
thanks for any advice.
boombanguk
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