General Website Optimization

[DaFool]

This isn't related to VNs or anything, but something related to work. With search engines now more sophisticated, they summarily ignore tags because of tag-spamming.

Let's say I have a website that is mostly flash with xml data. There's only one html page wrapper for it. I tried searching for it and some hits just redirect to the xml data in xml format. So if a random passerby happens to search some terms and come across a listing, he'll just be redirected to the unformatted data.

Is there a way to better make the website search-engine friendly without having to make static page versions of all the flash pages?

[Scout]

You really shouldn't use Flash for any navigation whatsoever.

It's a really bad practice, and nowadays there isn't any point in doing it, since there's nothing you can do in Flash that you can't do with HTML and JavaScript in a way that's much faster, and degrades much more nicely. Flash should only be used for embedded content like games or videos; there's no reason a modern website should use it for navigation in any way.

[Topagae]

"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."

[DaFool]

I guess I should mention that the site advertises Flash animation services... which wouldn't be convincing if it weren't in Flash. I checked the competitor sites and they all pretty much use Flash even in navigation. The question is how to make our site 'more visible' given the constraints that Flash sites are barely parseable.

[Jake]

@Scout
The sites I see that do, want their website to be fairly animated. Which is a pretty good reason.

If they see "being animated" as more important than "showing up in search engines", that's their lookout. But the vast majority of the time, it's a pretty stupid reason for sticking everything you're displaying into a Flash app.

- Flash can redirect to other pages, so if you want to have a fancy Flash nav menu, that's still no reason to hide all your content inside the app
- Flash can include plain text content, which supposedly is indexable by search engines (at least by Google), and if your site contains significant text, then this is one obvious option.
- There are other options for a lot of animation reqs which aren't so hidden from search engines.



To DaFool's problem, I don't know exactly what the situation is, but if the XML data is just in plain XML files which are read by the Flash app, would it be possible perhaps to include an XSLT stylesheet which renders out the Flash app, so if someone finds a search engine link to one of the XML files, when they load it in their browser the stylesheet gets used and they see the Flash app?

One widely-adopted approach seems to be to re-write the whole website in HTML alongside the Flash version. Like that you have an indexable, searchable version of the site, which I guess could even have JavaScript to redirect users to the Flash version. Maybe your HTML version could even be the XML data run through XSL, for people who don't have Flash installed or have it turned off.

Failing all that, did you try searching Google for something like 'Flash SEO'?

[Incendium]

It's really hard to say without knowing the directory structure of the site(s), but you could try dropping a robots.txt file into the root directory which instructs (most) search spiders to ignore certain files. If you wanted it to ignore any XML files, you could possibly use something like this:

Code: Select all

User-agent: *
Disallow: data.xml
Disallow: data2.xml
... 9998 rows later ...
Disallow: data10000.xml

Alternatively you could add meta robots tag if it's just a single page, but I've found spiders will still sometimes ignore it so it's best to have both.

Code: Select all

<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">

The problem here is that it's not really easily scalable and a pain in the ass when you want to add more files.

To get around the gibberish in the search term, you can just add a meta description tag. Something to this effect would work:

Code: Select all

<meta name="description" content="A brief summary/description of the content on the page, which may appear in search engine results">

The real issue here is that using flash is a very bad idea if you are looking to do search engine optimizations. The main problem is that the majority of your content will not be indexed properly due to the data not being accessible (unless you duplicate the content in the associated <object> tag, but then you have the problem of duplicating content and keeping them synced). This means that search engines will try to piece together information based on the information is on the landing page which will most likely only be a very small and generic description.

[DaFool]

I've read that modern search engines summarily ignore meta tags or even treat them as spam due to abuse in the past. A simple way to make your site stand out is simply to make sure all the text is relevant.

The site I'm dealing with is already 2 years old and we're trying to stretch it a bit further before considering allocating budget for a site overhaul. Thing is that it has aged gracefully -- being a primarily 2D artistic site, when compared to previous html implementations which started to look like geocities circa 1997. The original designer is very creative and went all-out on the transition animations so we can't exactly break it up into individual html snapshots. But what Jake suggested regarding using XSL stylesheets looks to be the best solution without modifying the existing content too much. If we can't have the server automatically format the xml for various browsers, then I might have to dig in and manually craft a custom xsl stylesheet for every xml page.

[littleramyun]

I think the idea of creating an HTML version of the site would at least be helpful, even if it doesn't fix your problem. Personally, I choose HTML versions of sites when given the option. Also, if you're using the site as showcase for potential clients, its a very good idea to have the option.