Tricking the Search Engines, Does It Get You Anywhere?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has evolved tremendously over the past five years. Many SEO techniques that used to get websites on the first page of Google very quickly are now very obsolete. You may be familiar with many of them such as
• stuffing keywords within the content
• stuffing keywords within the meta tags
• adding content with the same color as the background
• redirects
• and many more.
Search engines (especially Google) have become very smart in detecting spammy SEO techniques. Since the beginning of our company, we have made a concrete decision to stay away from these tricky and spammy techniques.
Hiding Content on All-FLASH Websites
All-FLASH websites are among the most beautiful and appealing websites and have become very popular within the past few years. The “load-time” is a huge drawback on these websites, but that's not all. The biggest challenge with all-FLASH websites is that the search engines (including Google) are “blind” to them. Their spiders are not yet capable of reading the content of all-FLASH websites.
Some of the SEP and SEO companies which favor all-FLASH websites for their clients have come up with “creative” and spammy techniques to go around this challenge. One of these techniques is “hiding the content” behind the website.
The developers of these sites use codes such as:
< script type = "text/javascript" > var myflash = Flash ("Flash/Flash.swf", "base", "100%", "100%", "10", "#ffffff"); myflash.write("flash"); </ script >
This code tells the browser to “cover the whole page with the FLASH file.” Consequently, all the content on this page will not be viewable by the search engines.
In principle this approach is very similar to the old “coloring the content as the background” technique. Search engine are able to read the content, but human users cannot.
The main problem with this technique is that Google and other search engines can easily tell of it. And since it is against their SEO guidelines (to hide text from viewers), they will not rank these sites highly on their database.
I Want FLASH AND I Want to Be on the First Page of Google
Well, for you, the solution is very simple. What we recommend to our clients is the combination of FLASH and HTML or FLASH and PHP. We can bring together the best of both worlds – your website will look beautiful AND it will be placed very high on Google.
