Google doesn't read the flash text in my flash website

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Google doesn’t read the flash text in my flash website. This is because I use movie clips within other movie clips.

I wondered if anyone knew a workaround or trick that I could use to get text into google. I have a couple ideas but they’re just ideas.

I would like to create an alternate page that is not flash, but a regular html page with all of the text I want google to read inside it. Somehow I use code to tell it that when a user clicks on the link, to redirect them to the flash webpage, but when a search engine sees it, to send the search engine/google to that regular html page, where it will gather all of the text and then that text will show up on google’s page when you do a search and my site on google? Even if this was possible, would google frown upon this and ban me or something?

The other idea I have is to use invisible text at the bottom of my page. This will be regular html text that is the same color as my background. But I heard this can get you banned from search engines like google if you are using lots of keywords, but I wouldn’t be using keywords. I’d be using the few sentences of content that their stupid crappy technology doesn’t read, forcing me to bust my hump trying to find a workaround for. It sucks that google doesn’t even use keywords in my metadata for rankings either. So I can’t even use that with them.

Anyone got some ideas/info?

Thanks in advance.

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Google is not the only “user” that can’t read the text embedded in your Flash movies. Blind visitors using assistive technology such as screen readers will not be able to access it, nor will some users with mobile devices that don’t have Flash support.

You can - and should - provide alternative content that can be read by your visitors if Flash is unavailable for any reason, and that should solve your Google problem at the same time.

There are plenty of articles on the subject. These should help get you started:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/alternative_content.html#ach-setscr

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May I suggest, as a rule of thumb, to instantiate your text content as opposed to loading it in, within movie clips, using text fields that have selectable text. This will help.

But as TechnoBear points out, provide alternative content, this is a must.

The second link: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/alternative_content.html#ach-setscr << this one

It mentions SWF Object, thats what you should be using and its really easy.

When building your site:

  1. Create a content API (i.e. PHP) to load content dynamically into the Flash site
  2. Create a regular site (i.e. PHP/HTML)
  3. Share the data sources (i.e. mySQL database for data, PHP API to load the mySQL data into the Flash site, and PHP website load from the same data from the same database into the non flash site.

You then have the best of both worlds, dynamic content that is easily updatable and shared.