How to show HTML pages instead of Flash to search engines

Question

Let's say I have a plain HTML website. More than 80% of my visitors are usually from search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. What I want to do is to make my whole website in Flash.

However, search engines can't read information from Flash or JavaScript. That means my web page would lose more than half of the visitors.

So how do I show show HTML pages instead of Flash to the search engines?

Note: you could reach a specific page/category/etc in Flash by using PHP GET function, for example: you can surf trough all the web pages from the homepage and link to a specific web page by typing page?id=1234 .

Answer 1

Short answer: don't make your whole site in Flash.

Longer answer: If you show humans one view and the googlebot another, you are potentially guilty of " cloaking ". If the Google Gods find you guilty, you will be banned to the Supplemental Index , never to be heard from again.

Also, doing an entire site in Flash breaks the basic contract of the web, namely that you can link to specific content from other sites or in emails. If your site has just one URL and everything else is handled inside of Flash ... well, I don't know what you have, but it isn't a website anymore. Adobe may like you, but many people will not. Oh, and Flash is very unfriendly to people with handicaps.

I recommend using Flash where it is needed (videos, animations, etc.), but make it part of an honest-to-God website.

Answer 2

Facebook requires you to build applications in Flash among others but html, why? I do not know, but that is their policy and there has got to be a reason.

I have been recently developing simple social applications in Flash (*.swf) and my latest app is a website in flash that will display in tab of my company webpage in Facebook; at the same time, I also want to use that website as a regular webpage on the internet for my company. So, the only way I could find out to display html text within a flash file is by changing the properties for the text wherever I can in CHARACTER to "Render text as HTML", look for the symbol "<>". I think that way the search engines will be able to read your content and process your website accordingly. Good luck.

Answer 3

What I want to do is to make my whole website in Flash

So how to accomplish this: show HTML pages instead of Flash?

These two seem a bit contradictory.

Important is to understand the reasoning behind choosing Flash to build your entire website.

More than 80 percent of my visitors are usually from search engines

You did some analysis but did you look at how many visitors access your website via a mobile device? Because apart from SEO, Flash won't serve on the majority of these devices.

Have you considered HTML5 as an alternative for anything you want to do with Flash?

Answer 4

As you say that you can reach the Flash page by get variable using page ID or any other variables. So its good. I hope you will add Flash in each HTML page. Beside this, you can add all other HTML contents in hidden format. So the crawlers could reach the content and your site will look-up in Flash. Isn't it?

Answer 5

Since no-one actually gave you an straight answer (probably because your question is absolute face-palm-esque), i'll try:

Consider using the web-development approach called progressive enhancement . Now, it's fair to say that it probably wasn't intended for Flashification of a website, but you can make use of it's principles.

1. Start with your standard HTML version of your website
2. Introduce swfobject to dynamically (important bit) swap out the HTML content for it's Flash equivalent
3. Introduce swfaddress to allow for deep linking into your Flash movies (pseudo-URLs)

Granted, steps 2 and 3 are a little more advanced that how i've described them and your site size/structure/design may not suit this approach, but at least it's an answer.

All that being said, I agree with the other answers/comments about the need for using Flash to display your entire site - there's very very very few reasons anyone would do that, and there's more reasons than already added as to why not to (iOS devices etc)...