Robots.txt

[danny boy]

hi there,

i need some help from you guys regarding robots.txt. the thing is that a client wants to create a new web site. he wants the site to be designed in flash and get good ranking on SE. i told him flash wasnt the best thing to do if you want to rank well on search engines.
he asked me if we could make another site in plain HTML and tell the robots on the robots.txt file to index only the HTML site... in shorts, he wants visitors to see the flash site and SE to see and index the HTML site.

i did not know what to tell him... is that possible? how can you do that? can anyone give me a hint about it?



danny boy

[Jason]

Robots.txt prevents pages being indexed as far as I know, so I suggest you just allow the search engine robots to index what they can - after all, if they can index the page it will, if it can't, it won't. Keep us posted!

[Jason]

May be implement the flash content in the HTML page, and use meta tags.

[danny boy]

yes, thats what i thought: robots.txt files exclude certain webpages from indexing...
Mmm... but now that i am thinking about it... i think there is a possibility to tell the robot not to index the flash site if you keep the flash files on a specific directory and tell the robot to index the whole site except that directory... something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /flash/docs/


what do you think?

[Johan007]

Forget the robot.txt your wasting your and your clients time/money.

As long as the navigation and text is done in HTML/DHTML there is NOTHING wrong with Flash. Can I plug one of sites as an eg: www.glowbe.co.uk (DHTML menu and fully indexed apart from the portfolio that they did not want indexed).

[Buskerdoo]

robots.txt isn't your answer.
why not just create html pages with flash on them. we've done it with great success.