Is it OK to hide text...

Hi,
because my website contains a lot of flash images i was wondering if it was OK to hide some text which the flash file contains behind the flash file. This is so that search engines can categorise my site better as it will look like my site contains no text at all!

 

No. The search engines will still see it as search engine spam.

 

Stupid search engines

 

On a similar subject.

If I was running a movie site, would it be OK to hide 'spoiler' information? And tell users to hilight if they want to read it?

 

Ä°ts the same method hiding words in any kind , is simllar to hide meta keywords.

In advice dont do that , you will be get sandboxed on google..

 

I have seen some forums use a "Click to Reveal Spoiler" technique.

 

I have seen the same as wd_2k6.
A simple javascript would do it OR you could host all the spoilers on a different site and do a mini iframe and put the hidden text in there OR (javascript again) you could make a link that when clicked displays a javascript alert that shows the written spoiler.


Dom

 

You could put the spolier information on another page, perhaps a clickable pop-up window...

 

yeah, using simple _blank

 

The <object> element provides for graceful failthrough. Browsers that can't open the Flash object are given the failthrough content. For example, a Flash movie could deliver a jpeg image if there's no Flash plugin. If the browser can't do images, provide text. A search bot would see the text.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
        data="someflash.swf">
  <param name="wmode"
         value="opaque" />
  <img src="flash-still.jpg"
       alt="a still from the Flash movie" />
  <p>A 16 ton weight falls on a cartoon character in this Flash movie.</p>
</object>

Code (markup):

cheers,

gary

 

Yes, this is similar to the 'alt' text for images when using the 'img' tag.

 

To some small extent. The object failthrough is virtually unlimited. It can be anything that could otherwise appear in a document.

cheers,

gary