Converse.com - flash and html version of site... bad idea?

[seosurfer-288319]

I have a questions regarding Converse.com. I realize this ecommerce site is needs a lot of seo help. There’s plenty of obvious low hanging seo fruit.  On a high level, I see a very large SEO issue with the site architecture.

The site is a full page flash experience that uses a # in the URL. The search engines pretty much see every flash page as the home page. To help with issue a HTML version of the site was created. Google crawls the

Home Page - Converse.com

http://www.converse.com

Marimekko category page (flash version)

http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko

Marimekko category page (html version, need to have flash disabled)

http://www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko

Here is the example of the issue. This site has a great post featuring Helen Marimekko shoes

http://www.coolmompicks.com/2011/03/finnish_foot_prints.php

The post links to the flash Marimekko catagory page (http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko) as I would expect (ninety something percent of visitors to converse.com have the required flash plug in). So the flash page is getting the link back juice. But the flash page is invisible to google.

When I search for “converse marimekko” in google, the marimekko landing page is not in the top 500 results. So I then searched for “converse.com marimekko” and see the HTML version of the landing page listed as the 4^th organic result. The result has the html version of the page. When I click the link I get redirected to the flash Marimekko category page but if I do not have flash I go to the html category page.

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Marimekko - Converse

All Star Marimekko Price: $85, Jack Purcell Helen Marimekko Price: $75 ...

www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko - Cached

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So my issues are…

Is converse skating on thin SEO ice by having a HTML and flash version of their site/product pages?

Do you think it’s a huge drag on seo rankings to have a large % of back links linking to flash pages when google is crawling the html pages?

Any recommendations on to what to do about this?

Thanks,

SEOsurfer

[seosurfer-288319]

Tom,

Thank you for taking the time to look at the site and giving a detailed response. I’ve been doing some research myself and my findings mirror your assessment. Thank you for recommended action items too. Converse uses http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ which is a good site experience but as you pointed out not so hot for SEO.

--SEOsurfer

[Tom-Anthony]

Great question!

Firstly - unfortunately, Steve's suggestion isn't going to be viable for you. The # portion of the URL is not available to your code server-side, so you won't be able to determine where the rel canonical should point.

Furthermore, if they are committed to keeping the flash for now, and all as a single unit so one URL (the homepage), then you are going to have to accept that some juice intended for subpages is going to go to the homepage. You cannot do anything about that aspect, so you need to focus on the rest of the problem. However, whilst far from ideal, at least the juice is hitting the site somehow.

So… what to do?

Firstly, I'd start getting into the mindset of thinking in terms of the HTML site as the main/canonical site, and the Flash site as the 'enhanced experience' version. In this way, the HTML version is going to be the version that should be crawled by Google, and should be linked to.

Actions:

1. Setup detection for mobile user-agents (out of preference I'd say all, but at least those known not to support flash, such as iPhone/iPad) and search engine bots, and ensure they get served the HTML version. Currently your homepage requires a click through on iPad offering an impossible Flash download, why not serve them the HTML page off the bat.

Is this cloaking? No! The HTML version is the main version, remember? It's no more cloaking than if you detected the user agent and then chose to serve the Flash version to Googlebot.

I actually discussed this with Jane Copeland at the fantastic Distilled link building event a couple of weeks back, and she agreed with me and said if it would stand up to a manual inspection then it is the right course of action.

2. Get all links in articles, press releases, directories or whatever else that are linking to specific pages and are originating from in house (or any source you have control over) to link to the HTML pages.

3. If the user arrives, has Flash and has arrived to an HTML link, you can now redirect to the Flash link for that page so they get the 'enhanced experience'. Don't use a 301 redirect -- remember the HTML version is the main version!

4. If the user arrives via a Flash link, but doesn't have Flash, but does have javascript you can detect the # variable and redirect them to the HTML page to help them along.

5. Educate the relevant stakeholders regarding point 2. I see you have a 'flashmode=0' option, tell them about this and how to use it get the URLs they need.

So where does this leave us?

1. The search engines can crawl all your lovely content, and they can ignore the flash version completely.

2. You are getting inbound links to specific pages. These pages have their own titles and meta descriptions… and content! Because they are the real site!

3. Users with Flash arriving via these links are landing on the correct Flash page of the site and are experiencing the rich site that you want them to.

4. Users arriving without Flash are getting the correct page if they arrive via an HTML URL. If they arrive via a Flash url then they get the correct page if they have javascript on (e.g iPad users), or they get the fallback of the homepage (rare).

I had a client with an almost identical situation, and I rolled out an almost identical solution to this, and they got crawled very quickly, shot up in Google and have stayed there for months.

Hope it helps. Let us know how you get on!

[stevenmusumeche]

It's definitely a drag to have your links diluted between 2 versions of the site.  There are a few solutions you can use, but the easiest would probably be to start using the rel=canonical tag on the flash version which points back to the same or similar page on the HTML site.  That way, the engines know that the version you want indexed is the HTML version.