Flash and Usability

[nicolariva]

Tryind to figure out a different way to use flash on website and help both users and search engines. I want to make a layer with a different z-index the same dimensions and size of the menu in flash, that shows the menu in plain text. This because i want the spiders to take and spider the urls. But doing in this way, i would give the menu also in case of users that do not have macromedia.

Do you find that doing it in this way, (or giving a behaviour of not showing at the layer)might be considered as a form or black hat seo?

Thanks

[egain]

Stupid suggestion (or maybe not)

But how about making the flash a part of the site ie something to grab attention rather than making it the be all and end all of the website, instead relying on traditional text based and contextual linkage to navigate users round the site.

This will no doubt in the long term benefit the search engines, but also allow those users without Macromedia installed (and those using textbased browsers) to navigate round your site without any issues

[nicolariva]

Didnt' get the spirit of your post (maybe). Are you saying that my solution wont' be considered as black seo?

Just because what i understand you are saying, is what i'm trying to do: a flash animation on top of the page that gathers attention and interest, but it does have also inside the menu to navigate thru the website.

So the solution to put the layer under the flash would be a different, uncommon solution to the one (so common) to put the link in plain text on the footer of the page. I think that putting it under the flash could help usability and seo at the same time.

Am i wrong?

[gobeyond]

I avoid Flash animinations like a plague. They do nothing to help the users. The only thing they do is to annoy the visitors and drive them away.

Plus not all users have Flash plugin. If you require a user to download the Flash plugin to see your site, you can be sure that you will lose a lot of them. As to search egnines, I haven't run across a spider that can parse what's in a Flash file.

I know a lot of site owners and web designers like Flash, but take a look of the top 10 most visited web sites and see how much Flash they have. Flash ads are different.

[rainborick]

Google will read the text in a Flash/.swf file and it will also follow links that use complete URLs, but since the Flash files are considered as individual documents and not a part of the parent (much like the content in an <iframe> tag), they rarely rank for any search term. And since neither Yahoo! nor MSN/Live will crawl Flash files, so you need to accomodate them as you do users who run without the Flash plug-in. The best approach probably depends on the individual site and its content. Its not something I've tried, but I think you can include some keyword-rich text within the <object></object> tags to give a main page a chance at some rankings (the same way you would with a <noframes> tag) without disturbing your overall design. But most articles I've seen suggest creating some dedicated HTML pages to serve to search engines and non-Flash users.