ooops Link Below...

CS said :

---not true if you're talking about this same site. the reason the words aren't visible on the page is because they are part of the meta information and not the body content.---

Body Text From The Site discussed

----- Lagrange - Atlanta - Columbus | New, Used - Preowned Car, Truck and SUV Dealership | Bill Johnson Motors Pontiac Buick Cadillac GMC | Georgia -----

Verbatim of the the title tag and combination of the keyword stuffed meta tags, that coupled with a Google bomb link campaign may be all that is needed to get the site to rank.

CS said

----"If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed."

if you want to make that bet i might know how to get the manual review -----

Game on.. We can agree on the terms, just contact me from the link above.

Search engines take the path of least resistance period. Flash currently isn't that path, and will not be for a while.

i revisited this topic to correct some misinformation. the site used an example here, bill johnson motors, is not cloaking.

paul said

"Anytime you show the search engine something different than what you are showing human eyes it is unethical in the eyes of many."

true.

"It is cloaked content point blank."

not true if you're talking about this same site. the reason the words aren't visible on the page is because they are part of the meta information and not the body content.

"Here is how the spiders see the site he referenced above:"

and that is exactly how all users see the site through a text only browser.

"If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed."

if you want to make that bet i might know how to get the manual review

Richard,
In the example he gave have you looked at this?

It shows the search engine that the site contains information about GMC Dealers in Atlanta and Columbus when none of the content displayed on site is relevant to either location directly other than close proximity. I could not even find those terms used anywhere on the site.

If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed. That is an old school black hat technique.

They might as well have used Markov chain generated content. Just as unethical just a little easier to detect.

Anytime you show the search engine something different than what you are showing human eyes it is unethical in the eyes of many. It is cloaked content point blank.

Then again I am also of the opinion as soon as the search engines start worrying about my business model I will start worrying about theirs. -- From affiliate marketing

Long Live Google Bombing!!!!!

Paul,

Regarding your comment "Showing the search engines one thing and the surfer another is exactly what Jeff meant by "gray hat", I think, in his statement above."

Depending on what you are showing them, it may be black hat or it may be gray hat. Some people may also construe white hat seo as gray hat or even black hat depending on their knowledge of SEO.

What I would like to know is what Jeff is referring to with his statement and why he deems the practices to be gray hat.

this development only distances google further from their competitors, and isn't a game changer for me or how i will do things this year or next year.

there are lots of computers out there that are still stuck on the default msn/live.com home page because their owners are none the wiser.

people in the know, like everyone reading this website, are searching far more often than joe schmoe with his default microsoft search engine. google's marketshare is flying high, but google users are searching far more often than live users.

i design sites for firefox and opera in mind, too. you can't just ignore a chunk of the pie because one avenue looks awesome and is easier compared to the alternatives.

ps thanks for the mention, joe.

Paul,

I have to agree and disagree with your statement. I agree that it is never a good idea to spam the search engines, however there is a place for this.

Google looks at whether content is relevant to your website and whether you use keywords excessively. When you start adding content to your page that is off topic just to get traffic you get in trouble. When you use keywords too much and you get in trouble. Both these are considered SPAM.

All I say is that you could use FLASH to assist in SEO. I can see it working great on a landing page where I do not want the visitors to drown in the text but I want them to convert with a form. You simply add Flash with relevant content and without spamming keywords and it will help getting you placement and Google will not ban you since people get to where they want to go.

The simple rule for Google is: Are visitors getting where they want to get. Isn't that what search engines are for? Don't dissappoint them and you will not fall out of grace. If all web designers would be honest, Google would be out of business.

----So I think I will make a little image rotater flash app, with tiny little buttons (1 pixel big or something) so no actual people will click it, but the bots will and thus read all the text. Kinf of what people already do with the noframes tags and text behind other content through iframes.---

The same theory as hidden pixels, doorway pages, hidden text and cookie stuffing. Not a novel idea and against acceptable standards.

Showing the search engines one thing and the surfer another is exactly what Jeff meant by "gray hat", I think, in his statement above.

Here is how the spiders see the site he referenced above:


All of the hidden text on that page does not represent the actual flash content. It is keyword stuffed deception used only for SEO.

What is nice though is if the G were to every take notice of this the footprint left by the vendors that use these types of techniques will make it easy for them to deindex this stuff then they get to start over from square one.

Jeff,

According to Adobe's website, SWF files were already being indexed it was simply the dynamic content not being indexed.

Read this:

"Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies."

I agree that Flash will still have lots of negatives including the problem of directly linking to the content you want. If you make a flash application that displays multiple content pages, you have to remember that Google and Yahoo will index the text, but throw it all together as one page. That means that simple HTML is still better since you can optimize each page for very specific keywords.

Now, I am thinking that since this is a new way of indexing, some webmasters are going to use the flash files for a way of optimizing their site. Just think for a minute how much text you can hide on a page without irritating your customer. Now with a flash app on that page you can hide a bunch of relevant text in there.

So I think I will make a little image rotater flash app, with tiny little buttons (1 pixel big or something) so no actual people will click it, but the bots will and thus read all the text. Kinf of what people already do with the noframes tags and text behind other content through iframes.

Anybody think it is worth a shot?

Jeff,

Can you expound on your comment "some "gray hat" techniques some of the flash website vendors have been saying for years that they were able to get their websites indexed"

Wondering what exactly you meant by this...

There are some good tricks of the trade out there when handling Flash and SE bots. Without totally geeking out, the best way to load Flash is through JavaScript or AJAX, but it should load in such a way that it is replacing text and links that do exactly what the Flash does.

Of course, Flash should still be avoided where ever possible, and never used for navigation or content display. Google is going to be able to read your flash, but what good does that do if the content you want is burried in a Flash file that you will still have to manually navigate to from a SERP link.

Chip-

On the flip side of this, Google now has a "Skip Intro" link to take googlers right to the content page and blow by the flash landing page.

Joe

references:

Jeff -

Good question posed...dealers need to (continue to) stay away from excessive/obtrusive use of flash applications.

Keep the site simple, provide easy navigation & focus on converting visitors for the desired call to action.

Most website providers haven't been able to optimize organically using standard site platforms - don't expect your new "flash" based site to magically appear on page 1 of Google. (I'm sure someone will be told this)

Eric

My biggest complaint is that it is not playing well with roboform yet. Then again I have not looked for a fix yet either,

ctrl+t will do just fine. I am a big fan of shortcuts too, just do not know all of them.

I would like to know how I can get rid of the download window if someone can help me out with this.

Thanks

You can download an add-on called "new tab button on tab right" to get that half-opened tab thing you're talking about. Call me a peacekeeper

BTW - I use keyboard shortcuts (old Photoshop habit) and the shortcut for opening a new tab is CTRL+T. I've never used the buttons at the top to open a new tab. And that shortcut works in both FF and IE7.

Oscar,

Yes I am aware of the scaling feature in IE7, but this is an article about FF3. It is a new feature for Firefox.

You can turn the download manager off, or get an add-on that kills the pop-up box. I agree with you - it is annoying. I was able to get rid of it, but I forgot how. I still have the ability to pull a history of my downloads, and that is very useful.

I have no idea what you're talking about with "half-opened tab"????

Alex,

Although I do like some of the new features and anything not MS is a plus for me, but Firefox download tool is annoying. Its like Higher Gear making me confirm that I want to do something. When I click a download button, I want to download and not get another popup that shows me this.

Not really impressed with the new features. FYI Your zoom feature was already on IE7 and still annoying is the fact that you do not have semi open tab, to create a new tab (in IE7 there is a half opened tab to activate a new tab instead of having to go to the menu to create a new tab in FireFox).

Brian get the IE tab add-on and set it to open dealer.com CP using IE rendering engine...

PicLens is pretty call too... check it out...

FireShot is a must... same goes for FireBug and FireFTP if you are developing stuff... and ChatZilla if you are on IRC.

Been using it as well...make the switch if you haven't yet.

The FireShot feature is a great tool...

Eric

yeah I should have figured, hmmmm.... don't take the over on our wager on the memory issue; I should have read your article instead of scanning through it. The memory allocation feature should correct the problem ff2 had with v mem.

C'mon Brian - don't you know me well enough by now to know that when I'm told not to jump off a bridge, I have to do it! I didn't notice any issues, but I only tried FF3 and DDC lightly. I'm sure they'll start supporting FF3 very soon. It works fine with iMagicLab too.

I never had the memory issue with FF2, so I can't comment on that.