100% Flash websites have the bad reputation of being associated with spam, not maintainable, unintuitive, and not search engine accessible. While those first few are myths to be busted elsewhere, this article will deal with the last issue.
Remember the old days of frames within sites? Now don’t try to cringe too much, but remember when not all browsers supported them? Well, there is an important parallel to draw here between framed sites and Flash sites. Both are seen as unconventional and have interesting problems dealing with information support among different mediums.
With framed sites, getting markup information to a user whose browser does not support frames is an obvious issue. The solution was the @
<![CDATA[@ tag. In this tag, a webmaster of a framed site can include the complete or partially complete version of a site to people without frame support.</p> <p>”Yup, old news, so how does this apply to Flash?” Well, in a Flash based website you are able to get all the information to a user through the ubiquitous Flash player. Wait a second, what if the end user DOESN’T have the Flash player. Hm…now what if that end user is the Googlebot crawler? You guessed it, @<noframes>@ tag to the rescue solving essentially the same problem as described above.</p> <p>This method lets you enter info into a web page that gets indexed by Google, has fairly nice semantic meaning (noframes == noflash), and without resorting to the kind of trickery that results in being banned by Google (ie: invisible text with the same color as the background.) Better yet, it doesn’t affect your layout at all…unless of course the end user doesn’t have frames =p.</p> <p>Example:</p> <p><code><br /> <html><br /> <head></head><br /> <body><br /> <noframes>This info gets indexed by Google, even though the only thing in this web page is my Flash application!]]>
