Dear Kalena...
Hi there - thanks for your fabulous newsletter and advice. I am doing some research on my friend's site, www.nolastudio.com.au (a Flash site). It used to be mosaicmadness.com.au (html site) which now redirects to nolastudio. Since the change, her rankings have dropped. Is this because the new site is Flash? If so, is there a way to optimise a Flash site so it can rank highly again? Any advice will be appreciated :-)
VlasiaKalena's Answer:Dear Vlasia
I've looked at both sites and there are quite a few problems:
1) The old domain
has not been redirected to the new one. Both domains are still being indexed by Google. View the Google cache of each domain and you'll see what I mean.
2) It appears both domains are hosted on different IP addresses and Google is treating them as separate sites with different PageRank scores and cache history. This could cause duplicate content problems and your friend should arrange to move both domains to the same IP address as soon as possible.
3) What your friend should have done is to implement 301 redirects from her old page URLs on
mosaicmadness.com.au to the replacement pages on
nolastudio.com.au. If she still knows the old page URLs she should implement the redirects quickly, before they drop out of the search engine index as non-existent. You can find plenty of posts by me on this blog about how to implement 301 redirects effectively. Click on the 301 redirects label below right for starters.
4) Sites built with Flash are generally not search engine friendly because they consist mainly of graphics and Shockwave files that search engine robots can't "read". If your friend's old site consisted of flat text-based HTML pages, it's no wonder the replacement Flash site is not ranking as well. I called up her page over 10 mins ago and I'm still seeing the [loading...] message! I suggest she implement a non-Flash version of the site as soon as possible and provide a link to this non-Flash version on her new home page. This will ensure visitors who dislike Flash (i.e. most of them) won't grow old waiting to see her content and search engines will be able to index it.
5) As an attempt to optimize a Flash site, somebody has decided it might be a good idea to stuff keywords galore between
no embed tags on your friend's home page. They're wrong. Have your friend remove that retro spam from her home page immediately or risk Google engineers
wetting themselves from laughter as they pass the site URL amongst themselves one rainy Friday afternoon. It's probably already tripped suppression filters.
6) As a short term fix to ensure your friend doesn't lose any traffic that is still trying to find pages on her old site, she should implement a Custom 404 error page on her domain that explains that she has moved domains and provides the new URL for visitors. Otherwise any persons clicking on outdated page links in the search engines will arrive at a plain 404 error page and likely click away never to return.
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Technorati | BloglinesLabels: 301 redirects, flash, search engine spam
Dear Kalena...
