Google and ethical cloaking for flash

[seodudee]

A client who has a website made entirely in Flash has provided a transcript of a video that is located within the flash as -5000px text.
Upon disabling CSS, this text appears clearly in the center of the page, however, with CSS enabled, it appears invisible on the Flash page.

Now before people start shouting unethical, let me just remind you that image replacement is allowed by Google as a valid form of seo.

So...thoughts?

[mcanerin]

If it's a true repesentation of the content, then it's no different than an ALT attribute on an image.

As a matter of fact, since a plugin is required to view Flash, it's best practice to provide alternative content for those who do not use plugins. The web is HTML (many people forget this for some reason) and any deviation from this requires backwards compatibility as a best practice, both for accessibility and for SEO.

The issue isn't IP delivery or CSS, the issue is tricking people for profit. I would not call this cloaking any more than I'd call using Alt attributes on images cloaking.

IMO, no problem.

Ian

[beu]

A client who has a website made entirely in Flash has provided a transcript of a video that is located within the flash as -5000px text.
Upon disabling CSS, this text appears clearly in the center of the page, however, with CSS enabled, it appears invisible on the Flash page.

Now before people start shouting unethical, let me just remind you that image replacement is allowed by Google as a valid form of seo.

Google has called tactics like SWFObject dangerous but at the same time they have also said that is no reason not to use them. There is a better chance that something like this could be detected as being bad than "normal" HTML so, be sure and dot your "i"s and cross your "t"s so to speak.

Google actually suggests offering an HTML version and sIFR as a best practices. Issue being that "image replacement" or "alternative text" is a function of the ALT tag and not technically "hidden" div content.

Other issues to consider in this time of "Universal" SEO for Flash. Flash only supports 11 languages and Google 100+, meaning that Google can't translate pages in Flash for more than 90 languages it supports. It is difficult for engines to extract images and/or video which are both parts of Universal. If the entire site lives at one URL that is another problem. If the URL changes but includes #anchors, that is another problem because Google ignores #anchors (pound signs) in URLs as the point to the same page in HTML.

That said, the cleanest method I've seen for optimizing Flash after sIFR which really only restyles text is mcanerin's.

Here is the link:
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/flash-seo-01.asp

Just a few things to consider.

:)