Question

I am creating a flash site and am trying to make it SEO. I’m thinking a possible solution would be to render html to any search engine bot, or to anyone who needs accessibility, and rendering the flash site for the rest of the users.

First question is, is this acceptable for google, and SEO in general?

This would mean I would redirect urls to flash users from site.com/home.html to site.com/#/home only if they weren’t a bot of some sort.

Second question is, is it possible to do this in javascript or rails?

I would do this by capturing the URL, checking to see who the user is (is it google, or is it a human), I’m just not sure how to do this with javascript/rails, whatever need be. Then once I found “hey this is google”, I would return the html page; if it was a user, I’d return flash.

Would that work? Is there something better?

Answer 1

It’d be worth reading up on Google’s policies toward cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages.

Personally, I’d build the site in HTML and use the Flash for progressive enhancement where appropriate.