SEO No No

Ask yourself this: if great search engine optimization (SEO) is all about searchbots being able to make sense out of the code that your content is wrapped up in, what happens when all of your content is contained in a fancy, yet inaccessible Flash movie? The answer is pretty straight forward: your SEO goes down the tubes, and no one finds worthwhile information about your site when they search for it. So how do you prevent your content from being doomed to a black-hole so dense so that no information can escape?

It’s a tough question. There are some promising techniques on the horizon, not the least of which is using Xpath to read content directly from the page, and of course a developer can always choose to simply use less flash. Unfortunately though, indexing content in Flash continues to be an issue the web development community struggles with. So, let’s refine our question.

How do we provide search friendly content on a flash heavy page without a Sr. Product & Marketing Manager at Google calling you out on violating their site quality guidelines?

Volkswagen got a first hand lesson on what is and is not acceptable in SEO practices last week as they were told that using invisible content markup to juice up their search ranking was not something that Google was going to take lightly. Interestingly enough this all came to light when the SEO blog searchengineland.com discovered that the Volkswagon US site, which Google had actually been featuring in their enterprise blog was spoofing their indexable content.

Just goes to show you, there’s no fooling the internet. An army of bloggers out there stands at the ready to keep our search results clean and honest, and they’re not amused by card tricks or rabbits mysteriously appearing out of a dusty top-hat.