I don’t make a habit out of “reblogging” or linkdumping, but since a lot of WordPress people seem to be finding their way to my blog, I wanted to write about this. I got an email regarding a new WordPress plugin called BlogPress SEO this morning. Normally, I would have considered reviewing it, but fortunately I’d already read Joost de Valk’s review-of-sorts. And so should you. BlogPress SEO is spam. It’s a link farm, and goes against every rule Google and other search engines have about linking. Read all about it on yoast.com.

Recently, I came across discussions on Twitter, and a blog post about ‘hidden links’ in my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Quite frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by this, and I’d like to explain how the situation came to be, and what I plan to change in upcoming versions.

History

When I did the first couple of versions of WP-Cumulus, it was not hosted on wordpress.org. All there was in terms of user support was the comments section of a blog post on this blog. To help people troubleshoot flash plugin trouble, I linked to that post in the alternative or “no flash” content. This content is shown only to user without (the right version of) Flash. It is very common among Flash developers to link ‘home’ this way. I was aware this would also be shown to search engines, but at the time there were only a couple of users. My reasoning back then was that providing a helpful message was important enough to warrant putting the link there.

Whoa, millions of incoming links…

Then, Cumulus started catching on. I moved it to wordpress.org, where it made the top 10 most popular plugins a few times. People were starting to port the plugin to other platforms, and I started getting tons of support requests. Some days, just answering these would take hours. I was overwhelmed. Around the same time, I started noticing an increase of traffic on my blog. At first I thought it was because people were googling for the plugin, but it soon became apparent that there was more going on.

As an unexpected side-effect of the ‘no flash’ link, my blog now had thousands of incoming links, causing it to rank well in Google. Because I sometimes write about things like hosting, advertisers were starting to show interest, and I have to admit I jumped at the opportunity. As time went by, it became increasingly ‘difficult’ to remove the links. Here I was, making a little extra money because of a link I forgot to remove somewhere along the way. But even so, I no longer feel comfortable with the current situation, and have been planning to remedy it for a while.

Future versions

As you may have read on this blog, I’ve been trying to get more people involved in the project. It needs a better programmer than I am to keep it up to date. Unfortunately, this has not proven very easy. As a result, WP-Cumulus 2.0 has been in development for over a year, and one of the things it aims to fix is this ‘hidden links’ situation. I’ve decided that any link in the alternative content should be optional, and disabled by default. And it should probably point to the wordpress.org page instead of this blog. By default, it makes sense to show the regular (html) tag cloud to users without Flash. Version 2.0 will probably do it that way.

I’ll be working on Cumulus 2.0 this week (with one of the best software developers I know, whoohoo!), and I hope to have a rough version some time this month. It’ll put you in control of what is shown to users, search engines and everthing else. As it should have been all along.

I don’t like ‘re-blogging’. I try and write original stuff and not point to other people’s posts. This video however is essential if you’re serious about SEO and WordPress, and you haven’t seen it already you really should. My fellow countryman Joost de Valk talks about SEO and shares some great tips. The video is after the break.


WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies a4uexpo London 2008 from existem on Vimeo.

We’re now three days into my little experiment, and it seem the three most important search engines have found the page I created. Here are the results I’ve been able to gather so far…

Things are looking rather grim. Although the page containing the swf file has been indexed by all three major search engines, none of it’s contents are turning up. This surprises me. Other movies on my site have had their static contents indexed, so why not this one? Perhaps indexing an swf requires more processing time and this one’s in some kind of queue waiting to be processed? I’ll keep checking to see if any of my fantasy words turn up.

To rule our any embedding code related weirdness, I’ll post the movie again here using SWFObject. Most of my movies that are currently in Google’s index use this method. I used a simpler one in the original experiment because I thought that would improve things. Apparently not.

UPDATE
I noticed that Google came by and indexed this post, again without touching the swf. Since this experiment is not about getting the swf file indexed, I’m just going to link to it from here and add it to Google’s indexing queue. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE2 – Finally, some real results!
Google has indexed the flash movie. The short description is “[fake word] static text field dynamic text field, content set through actionscript dynamic text field, content loaded from text file.” So that’s all the static text in the movie. I updated the table to reflect this and manually added the swf file’s path to Yahoo and to Live (which would only let me add the root url for some reason). Let’s see what they make of it.

Another thing I noticed is that the SERP links to the swf file, not the containing page. This means users will see the movie without context, probably at the wrong size and without any parameters the html page passes to it (so-called flashvars). So even if your movie is indexed, it’s still pretty much useless.

Triggered by a comment on my recent Flash SEO post I decided to set up my own experiment to find out if, and to what extent search engines index Flash content.

The movie you see above and the text file it loads contain five words that are currently not in Google’s index.

• One is in a static text field, Flash’s simplest way of displaying text.
• Another is put into a dynamic text field using actionscript.
• A third is loaded in from a text file and put into a dynamic field.
• That text file contains an extra variable to see whether SEs index the file.
• The last one is declared in the movie’s actionscript, but not displayed.

I’m pretty sure the first one will get indexed, but if any of the others show up in Google I’ll be surprised.

It’ll take a little while for search engines to index these pages, but once they do we’ll have a better understanding of how they see Flash content. Until then, please don’t post my “words” anywhere. Thanks. I’ll be sure to post the results as soon as I get them.

[EDIT]The result are here.[/EDIT]

This article pointed me toward Squidoo, a tool that lets users build their own personal homepage. Ideal for first-timers looking for an easy way to create an online presence, but because it’s really well implemented it’s fun for other users as well. As the article at SEOking points out, you can RSS feeds to your homepage. I wonder if the posts from those feeds are included in your outgoing Squidoo feed. That would enable Yahoo Pipes-like feed mashups…

There are plenty of other so-called “modules” that let you place all sorts of content on your Squidoo page. Cool stuff.

In my daytime job I’m a Flash developer. But when it comes to creating websites I don’t think Flash is the way to go. Not just because Flash has some serious accessibility issues, but mainly because Flash-only websites are very search engine unfriendly. They usually consist of only one HTML page, and most of those contain no readable content. So Google, MSN and Yahoo will have no clue as to what your site’s about. I’ve been pondering things you could do to fix or at least improve this. I’ve played around with a few of these ideas and techniques, others are still on my to-try list. Please let me know if you’ve come up with other solutions or have anything else to add.

1. Use SWFObject.

Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject is the way of embedding Flash movies into HTML pages. It’s only drawback is that it uses Javascript, but in return you get the best plugin detection that (no) money can buy, a fix for the Internet Explorer activation issue and the ability to add HTML content in a placeholder div for search engines and people with no Flash player installed. Put a short summary of what your site about (make sure you use plenty of keywords), along with contact details in there. That way, Google will a least find something it can read.

2. Accomodate deeplinking

Through a bit of PHP(*) and actionscript you can make sure anyone calling up www.yoursite.com/index.php?page=contact is taken to the contact ‘page’ in your flash movie. For a simple timeline-based Flash website the actionscript needed can be as simple as:

if( page != undefined ){
gotoAndStop(page);
}


If your movie has a key frame labelled ‘contact’, it will be shown.

For this to work you need to use PHP to tranfer the ‘page’ url variable into a flashvar. With SWFObject, the javascript code needed in the page will look something like this:

var so = new SWFObject("movie.swf", "mymovie", "200", "100", "7", "#336699");
so.addVariable("page", <?php echo $_GET['page']; ?>);
so.write("flashcontent");


Besides the obvious advantage of being able to send someone a link to a specific page, this also allows you to use a Google sitemap. Make sure you include a ‘menu’ listing of these links in the placeholder content so search engine bots can follow them.

A variation to this approach might be to create copies of your index.html with descriptive name like ‘about.html’. These can have different placeholder content but load the same Flash movie. No need for PHP, just add the right flashvar to have the movie skip to the right page. Obviously, this approach is best suited for small websites with only a limited number of pages.

* = Or any other server side programming language. Javascript probably has a few tricks up it’s sleeve as well.

3. Google sitemaps

A Google sitemap is an XML document that you place in your site’s root folder that contains the layout of your site. Google’s indexing mechanism will use this info to index every page on your site. You can simply put the “?page=something” links in there, and each page will be indexed. Especially for large websites, this could be an ideal way to make sure all your pages are spidered. Without having to link to every single one from the placeholder HTML.

4. Dynamic placeholder content

With the tweaks covered so far, each ‘page’ of your website will still have the same placeholder content. Whatever you chose to put in the SWFObject placeholder div. The trick now seems to be to generate a page with placeholder content that matches the content of the page the Flash movie will (initially) display. If you’re using something like “?page=about” in your URL, your movie will load(*) and display the about page. From then on, the user can navigate the site, but the placeholder text won’t change. This is not a problem, as search engine bots will not do this and the sitemap will ensure all of the URLs are called. So all we need to do now is create a script that inserts the “about” page content formatted as HTML into the page’s placeholder div.

If you’re using a CMS type solution, this might turn out to be quite easy. Instead of just generating XML for Flash to read, output that same content as simple <p>’s and <ul>’s and insert that into the page. For static websites this can be a bit of work, as all content needs to be maintained in the movie (or the XML files it loads) and in the PHP code. But if you’re serious about ranking well in search engines, it’s probably well worth the effort.

I’m not sure if Google will like this, any type of dynamic placeholder content might be considered ‘cloaking‘. Your best bet is probably to have the Flash content and the placeholder content match exactly.

* = Most Flash websites I’ve worked load XML data either from disk or through something like SOAP or Flash Remoting on a per-page basis.

5. Adding internal links to the placeholder content

Google sitemaps are great, but unless you create a script to do this for you, updating them can be a lot of work. A more practical solution could be to convert the internal links used in your Flash project into HTML. I’ve built numerous Flash projects that use a single XML document to describe each page. A link from one page to another might look something like:

<next>page2.xml</next>

This tells my Flash movie to load page2.xml when the next button is clicked. If your project uses a similar setup, it shouldn’t be too hard to translate this into:

<a href="index.php?page=page2">next</a>

If you succeed in adding links from your XML source as regular HTML links, your site will be truly indexable. In fact, you’ve now created a working HTML version of your website inside SWFObject’s placeholder div.

6. To the extreme: HTML style page refreshes

Since we’re now using HTML content in the placeholder div, search engine spiders will follow the links in that content and truly spider your website. One further step you could take is to use the same links inside your Flash movie. So if you’re on the about page, and the user clicks on your ‘contact’ button, use actionscript’s getURL command to get index.php?page=contact.

contact_btn.onRelease = function(){
getURL( "index.php?page=contact" );
}


This will cause an old-fashioned page refresh, but it will also update the address bar so people can bookmark all the pages in your site. The Flash movie itself will be cached by the browser, so page load times should be minimal. If you need to maintain user info from page to page, a local shared object is probably your best bet.

There’s also a way to update the address bar through javascript, but I wonder if that works on all browsers and whether it allows for bookmarking. If you can live with the page refreshes, this seems to be the best option.

Conclusion

I haven’t tested all of these approaches myself, and I’m definitely not an SEO expert. But I feel pretty confident that having dynamic placeholder texts that make your website indexable for search engine spiders, along with unique URLs for pages in your website will improve your site’s rankings dramatically. Like with AJAX it’s a question of prioritizing presentation and SEO for your website. Flash is unrivalled when it comes to creating visually exciting websites, but its troublesome to get Flash websites to be accessible and indexable. If you do decide you want to go with Flash, these tips might just help your audience find you.

It sometimes seems like there’s a new Google SomethingSomething service out there every day, but this post over on Joe Whyte’s blog is not about Google’s next step towards world domination. It lists all known filters and penalties that Google’s good old search engine applies to websites that for some reason appear suspicious.

One or two of these filter might very well be in effect for this blog. For one, this site has only very recently been moved to it’s own domain, and the domain has only been registered for about 9 months. Both of these facts might trigger the “sandbox filter”. And it has 28.000+ incoming links, all with the same anchor text, thanks to the tiny little credit link in my WordPress themes. Talk about a “Google bomb”. I didn’t even realize this when I added those links, nor did I imagine hundreds of people downloading and using my themes. An accidental bombing, which has made this silly little 20-post blog appear in the Technorati top 2000.

Currently, the Firefox extension I use to check pagerank shows this site’s homepage as being 0/10. It was 5/10 last week, and most web-based pagerank lookup tools still report 5/10.

It had been a while since I last visited Google’s sitemaps page. My movie weblog has a sitemap plugin installed that generates a feed that Google uses to index the site. It turns out Sitemaps has grown into “Webmaster tools”, and it’s great. Not only does it offer lots of details about how your is indexed, they’ve just added a tab that displays exactly who’s linking to what page on your site.

I’m very new to SEO techniques, but this seems like the perfect starting point for optimizing your site for Google. You can see what keywords are recognized in your site and how you rank for them.