Central Perk: Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

joi, 4 noiembrie 2010

Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Posted: 04 Nov 2010 07:45 AM PDT

Perhaps it’s related to Apple not installing flash on the newest air macs, but there’s been more talk than usual about flash & SEO in the past few weeks.

My position on flash and SEO is as follows:

I’d prefer to not use it, but I do understand that there are some circumstances in which flash makes a better user experience
If you do use flash, putting it anywhere along the mission critical path or main navigation is dangerous
If you do put put it in the mission critical path, you are going to have to maintain a separate HTML version for bots and the 20 million+ iphone and iPad users

Personally, I’m lazy. I like low maintenance websites (see how I manage a wordpress website). But if you’re a big corporation and have the manpower and other resources to support two websites, that’s fine. Just make sure you configure it properly so you don’t get flagged as cloaking. I would stay away from user agent detection and instead use JavaScript to detect the shockwave plugin. Are there some people with JavaScript disabled but flash enabled? Sure, but they are an outlier condition. Using JavaScript will cover the users and the bots.

Another thing to be mindful of is doing redirects. Since you will be creating an HTML version, that’s what will show in the SERPs. So, when a user clicks through, you’ll want to redirect to the flash version in the appropriate place. It can really get tricky, so be careful if you go this route.

Let’s recap:

Unless using flash adds to the user experience in a meaningful way, avoid it
If you do use flash, try to avoid using it in mission critical paths like main navigation and checkout
If you insist on using it in mission critical areas, you’ll have to create multiple versions of the same website. Make sure you have the resources to support it
Use javascript to detect for the the flash plugin instead of user agent detection to help you avoid the appearance of cloaking for nefarious reasons

photo credit: law_keven

Is WordPress Good or Bad for SEO Earlier this week there was a post on SEOBullsh*t that...
Why Advertisers Love Flash and Ajax, and Why it’s Really Stupid Steve Rubel has a smashingly good bit of conversation bait...
How To Shoot Yourself in The Foot With Bad Plan and a Bad CMS Implementation One of the biggest mistakes really large publishers make today...
WordPress SEO: WordPress Security Why it Matters to SEO In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack...
Jason Calacanis Please Stop Bad Mouthing SEO’s Because You Won’t Take the Time to Work With Good One’s Ok so Jason Calacanis is talking smack about bad SEO’s...

Advertisers:

Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.
Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.
Content Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per week
Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO Analysis
Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.