Have you ever wondered what the search engine spiders see when they come to your site? Is your code all HTML or Flash? What if your site is a combination of both HTML and Flash? Does any of this really make a difference to a search engine spider?
One tool to use is the Search Engine Spider Simulator found at http://www.webconfs.com. Just type your URL in the box and within a few seconds you can see what the search engine spiders see.
For example, here is an all flash site (site URL and name have been blocked to protect the innocent.
The only text on the site that was seen by the search engine spider was the name of the site. No meta description or keywords. The only link on the site seen by the search engine spider was a link to where you can download the latest version of Flash.
What about a site that is not created entirely in Flash, but has a Flash intro (again, site URL and name have been blocked to protect the innocent).
As you can see there is some text shown but only the text hidden behind the Flash intro. The first link shown is actually a link to the developer of the site — not the actual website itself. The second link goes to a 404 page. I have to give them points for having a link to their site map on their Flash intro page so at least the search engines can spider the rest of their pages. However, the site’s original home page — not the flash intro — has a lot of good content on it, but when the search engines first come to the site, they don’t see any of it! In my humble opinion, I am amazed that sites have flash intros — they don’t help with SEO and are just plain annoying.
What about Worthwhile’s website? We don’t have any flash on our site, but we do use some javascript to make our case studies rotate the way they do. How do the search engine spiders read javascript? Can they? Go here and type in http://www.worthwhile.com to get our results (I would have put an image up, but it wouldn’t have shown everything).
All the text can be seen and we have a nice long list of links that spiders can see as well.
Maybe your site isn’t entirely created in Flash, but maybe your site’s navigation is Flash — can the spiders see the links to your sub pages? What if your important information is in a Flash header? An alternative to Flash could be javascript which search engine spiders are able to read successfully.
Check out the Search Engine Spider Simulator on your own site — these spooky spiders will help improve your web presence.
