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Prevent Flash Site Navigation

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clip
Using flash for your site menus should be prevented because they lessen the chances of your site to be crawled by search engines. Why?

Search Engine crawlers use the links on your page to crawl your other pages. For example, your index.php contains a flash button that is linked to a forum.php. Since the link is encoded within flash, then there is no way that web crawlers would actually recognize it. But, if you placed an <a href="forum.php"> instead of the flash button, then the web crawler will be able to crawl to your other links.

I myself have been using flash menus and I just recognized the risk that I was doing. If you want to know some of your site's problems and errors, try google sitemaps, it'll be a good help.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
matt87
Ya this is true. But some people don't want all their pages to be crawled. Like me... I use the flash navigation because I don't want any of my other pages to be crawled. But this is a big no no to have. If you want to make your site look nice with the flash navigation then you can put it but make sure to add the same links to the bottom of the page so that people can still use your flash navigation and then your pages can still be crawled by the diffrent search engines.
Marston
matt87 wrote:
Ya this is true. But some people don't want all their pages to be crawled. Like me... I use the flash navigation because I don't want any of my other pages to be crawled. But this is a big no no to have. If you want to make your site look nice with the flash navigation then you can put it but make sure to add the same links to the bottom of the page so that people can still use your flash navigation and then your pages can still be crawled by the diffrent search engines.
You could also use a robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing "private" pages.
Nikkori
Quote:
You could also use a robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing "private" pages.

What do you mean? How?
clip
Nikkori wrote:
Quote:
You could also use a robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing "private" pages.

What do you mean? How?


I think this site would help you: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

They have all the info you need about robots. How to use them, where to put them and all sorts of stuff concerning exclusion of your pages that you don't want to be crawled. It's pretty simple really, you also have the option to put some on your meta tags. Very Happy
sgwreviews
I have a flash menu on one of my website's. The links are located in an .xml file.
Do crawlers see the xml file?
I don't think so, cause I haven't got a link to it besides the .swf file on the page.
Am I correct or not?
matt87
sgwreviews wrote:
I have a flash menu on one of my website's. The links are located in an .xml file.
Do crawlers see the xml file?
I don't think so, cause I haven't got a link to it besides the .swf file on the page.
Am I correct or not?


What web site do you have a flash menu on? Because on http://www.sgwreviews.frih.net/ there is no flash.
sgwreviews
Sorry, it's on www.freespaces.com/teselite
j0zman
Thanks for the hint. I am about to build my first Flash website. Maybe a mixture of Flash and static would work. Again thanks.
matt87
sgwreviews wrote:
Sorry, it's on www.freespaces.com/teselite


Ya, the crawlers will not be able to see you xml. So, you may need to use robots or something else to make the crawlers know about your other pages.
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