SEO - Search Engine Voids to Avoid (Frames, Flash and Folly)

Search Engine Robots are People, Too

Search engine robots are far from invincible. In fact, there are several things you can do to your web pages to make them nearly invisible to search engines. There are two major approaches to circumventing these "black holes", the first of which involves "cloaking" - creating two versions of a single page, one for search engines and another for users - and the second of which is simply avoiding them altogether.

The first method of cloaking is less preferable for two important reasons: First, it means creating two pages where you would normally be creating one. For sites with many pages, this can mean a significant time overhead. Secondly, displaying a different version of a web page to a search engines can easily be interpreted as a violation of their Terms of Service, and could result in your site being banned from their index.

In light of these two factors, avoiding the black holes seems to be the best practice. In this section, I will go over some of the most likely scenarios, which may result in ineffective search engine placement at best, and complete invisibility at worst.

Using Frames in Web Page - Bad Idea Number One

In HTML terms, a frameset is a set of tags that tell the browser how to display several different web pages in the same browser window at once. The blocks on the window that contain individual web pages are called frames. Frames are most commonly used to allow web site navigation to be visible no matter where the user scrolls to within the content.

With a page using a frameset, you will notice that there is a significant amount of text visible. When you view the source code, however, there is none of the valuable text visible at all. Since this is the code that search engine robots see, all that copy is completely invisible. All they see is your frameset code, which tells them nothing about what the actual page is about.

The Solution to Using Frames

The solution? Most layouts created using frames can be easily duplicated using <div> tags or tables. To avoid duplicating the navigation code on every page, you can use something called an include, which allow you to "include" the same chunk of code in several different pages without compromising the ability of search engines to index them.

If you absolutely need to retain the effect of having the navigation "float" above the page, unaffected by scrolling, you can incorporate some JavaScript to anchor it in place. Just remember to include the JavaScript in an external file!

Using Flash - Another Potential Bad Idea

Using Flash in Web Page - Bad Idea Number Two

The development and general acceptance of Macromedia Flash presentations on the web has made the format popular for creating multimedia web sites. With Flash, entire multimedia presentations can be crammed into an tiny file sizes for quick download and viewing.

Flash provides the ability for webmasters to create interactivity on a web site, which can be attractive and draw traffic -an important tool. The downside is that since a Flash Presentation is saved as a flat file, it can offer little information to search engines as to what is contained in it.

The Solution to Using Flash

The solution? Because of the nature of a Flash presentation, often you won't be able to get around using some text in the actual file. Often times, however, especially when an entire web site is constructed with Flash, the pages can be broken up into two kinds of sections: 1) sections where Flash is required and 2) sections where you can achieve the same effects without Flash.

By using an HTML layout for your page, and interspersing Flash elements throughout the page where they are necessary for presentation or interaction, you can allow most of the text on the page to be semantically correct for a search engine.

It takes a little more work to organize a web page this way, but it's much more sustainable, and can often reduce the Flash presentation file size, giving your visitors the added bonus of a faster download.

Using Splash Screens

The Problems with Splash Screens

Splash screens are purely graphical pages that act as a gateway to your site through the home page. This technique is used to give visitors an attractive, passive look at what the site they are about to enter is all about. Often this is accomplished through the use of a Flash presentation, but it can also be achieved through the use of still and animated graphics.

There are a couple of compelling reasons to consider abandoning this technique altogether. For one, studies have shown that splash screens often do not have the positive effect on a user's experience as was once thought and that visitors would rather have quick access to information and bypass the whole splash screen experience.

Secondly, and most importantly, since splash screens typically have little in the way of textual content, one would be rendering the most critical page on the entire site - the home page - invisible to robots in order to provide the gateway.

Since inbound links will more often than not be directed to your home page, it will be the first one indexed. Also, when potential visitors find your site on a search engine, you often will want to direct them to the home page, where you have more control over what navigational choices you offer. If the home page is not indexed well or is not indexed at all, the search engines will direct surfers to your other pages instead.

The Solution for Splash Screens

The solution? Simple: to offer a home page rich in semantically correct content. You will be improving a robot's ability to index your page while simultaneously making your page more usable for visitors. If you are looking for an opportunity to offer your visitors a rich multimedia experience, dedicate a portion of your page to a Flash presentation but make sure to offer some good textual content as well.

A good rule of thumb in deciding whether the text on your page will be properly indexed is to is to check the source code of your page by right-clicking on a browser window and selecting "View Source" or "View Page Source" from the context menu. This code is what the search engine robots will see, so it's important that it be just what they're looking for.

Lesson Summary - Splash Screens

In this short chapter, we discussed the most common techniques used by web developers that can result in rendering a web page invisible to search engines. Among these was the use of frames, using Flash for entire page layouts and employing splash pages instead of content-rich home pages. By avoiding these techniques you can be sure that search engines are finding your content, rather than non-descriptive HTML code.