Is the site cloaking?

[llaura_b]

Hi all,

I have a dreaded cloaking question...

A new client of mine recently had their website redone for them and I am concerned that there may be more to the site that meets the eye due to some very impressive rankings but not much on the SEO front.

In the first instance, the site is built in flash and I understood that this was very difficult for search engines to see.

Secondly, there are no meta-tags in the code and the title tag is the company name however when I run a test in SEO Workers brilliant analysis tool it returns a full compliment of tags including optimised title, description and keyword tags.

The tool also shows me that there are over 300 outgoing links to pages on the same domain but these aren't visible on the main page.

I have run a couple of basic checks e.g. using the 'translate this page' tool in Google to check for cloaking.

Is there any other technique/method that would result in the above happening and is it white or black hat?

I am worried that the site may drop like a stone if bad practices are being used.

Any help gratefully received.

L

[chrishirst]

probably detecting a flash enabled browser and showing the Flash site.

visit the site with a browser that does not have flash installed to see.

Is it the same information on the flash site as is it in the non-flash version?

[llaura_b]

Hi and thanks for your speedy response.

Because the site is built in flash there is an 'accesible site' link at the bottom that takes me to a homepage that includes the optimised meta-tags and title tags.

So that's what the search engines are picking up. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Am I correct in thinking that this is a perfectly acceptable SEO technique or could it cause problems down the line?

Thanks again.

Laura

[WebSavvy]

There are no problems with providing a text-only version. It's good web accessibility practice to do so especially when the site is in Flash -- a medium that is not "accessible" for all.

[Blue]

For our readers who don't know, one should make sure, when employing this technique (utlizing a flash detection script to deliver the flash version of a site to those with flash enabled/installed when having both a flash and non-flash version of a site) that only one version (the non-flash version) of the site is allowed to be indexed by the search engines.

[llaura_b]

Hi Blue

Currently I am immediately being taken to the flash version rather than the accessible version when I click search listing. I can then choose to visit the accessible version by clicking a link at the bottom right of the page.

Is this accepteble or do I need to ensure that code/redirects are added to ensure the the end user is taken straight to the html accessible version?

L

[ihelpyou]

Whatever is requesting your page is detected at the server level. If the user agent requesting your page has flash installed, it's sent to the flash page. If the user agent requesting the page does not have flash installed, it's sent to the accessible/text/html page. It's all done at the server level. I'm not sure what your question was, but you have to have that server level script set up that does the detection.

[IncrediBILL]

The easiest way to verify the server is sending different pages to flash and non-flash enabled browsers is to use the Lynx text-only browser to access the site.

BTW, did you check the dates on the Google cache for the pages to verify they were recent pages and not old ones possibly in use before the flash site update?

The results you see could simply be old pages still indexed that no longer exist on the site.

[Blue]

The best solution, in conjunction with what Doug said, is to have links to both versions of the site on both verions of the site.

In other words, have a link to the flash version on the html site and a link to the html version on the flash site.

This gives users ultimate control.

Just make sure search engines can't index both versions so as to avoid duplicate content issues and dual URL issues. You only want them to index the text version, which is the one that is optimized.

I personally don't trust that a detection script can keep search engines from indexing both versions. There are outside variables that can come into play. So, you need to employ non-indexing measures on the flash version.

[Dave Hawley]

Being one of those that hate having Flash FORCED upon me, I believe the best way is to have a standard HTML version and a link ONLY to a Flash version, which blocked by a robots.txt.

Sorry, Blue, I just echoed what you said :)

[Blue]

S'ok Dave. We're all here to help and the more the merrier I say! :)