I have been reading on Google’s Webmaster’s Blog. It was very interesting to see these 3 ‘no-nos’ of building a Google friendly Flash website.
1. No Cloaking!
Cloaking refers to the hiding of content behind a fake wall, be it Javascript or PHP or something along those lines. Now, at nothingGrinder we use a Javascript plugin known as SWFObject to, so to speak ‘Cloak’, our Flash websites. What we are doing is also known as Alternate Content. Providing alternate content goes along with accessibility best practices and is in-line with the W3C standards. So, how does this differ from Cloaking?
Cloaking is :
Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
Serving different content to search engines than to users.
Alternate Content is:
Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
Provide the textual contents of Javascript in a noscript tag.
So what is the difference? There isn’t any… well, not really. If you have an image displayed in Flash the same images should be displayed in HTML if the user doesn’t have or cannot see Flash. This is a best practice. On the other hand, if you display that image in Flash, but provide only Text when a search engine crawler comes along, then you are Cloaking.
At nothingGrinder, we provide a No-Flash-Displayed message to the google bots and in our Alternate content. Something that reads like:
If you are seeing this version of the website, you do not have Flash player install or you have Javascript disabled. In order to view the full version of this website, please install Flash player ‘HERE’
2. Javascript redirects
A javascript redirect is exactly how it sounds. It is a hidden link or a redirect in Javascript that can only be seen by users. So, when a user comes to the site a different set of content is delivered or that user is jumped to a user specific site. The search engines see only the simple text based version, which is usually different than the content being delivered to the user under the redirect.
3. Doorway Pages
A doorway page is a false page used to up search engine results. Users will never see this page but it will be delivered to robots. It usually consists of a set of links or keyword specific content that doesn’t actually reside on the website.
I think this one is almost impossible to get away with present day, but was in practice for a long time. Google got smart to it and their crawler is probably aware of this type of page.