Does Flash Redirect make G stop?

[SanDiego]

If I coded a flash swf and placed on my page to redirect to another page on my site after about 5 seconds, does G still see that as a redirect and how "punished" will the site be for doing so (if it does?)

[SanDiego]

Anyone know about flashcoding and google?

[sarahk]

Yep, Google can't index Flash, somehow or other you have to add some real content to your site. You can use hidden divs. Check out this tutorial:

http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/layers.php

[SanDiego]

I read the tutorial, very nice.
So If I have a page with normal real content on it but I want to redirect it after 5 seconds, you don't think G will penalize the page for it?

[sarahk]

I'd be inclined to have the flash page with either
* hidden content (while that's still allowed & undetected)
* a visible link to your html page

I wouldn't risk a redirect. They are detected and may be penalised. Plus not everyone will have flash, will want to install your version (takes a long time on dial up) etc so an html page is still valid.

Sarah

[SanDiego]

Well, the idea was to have a regular html page with a tiny SWF file embedded in it - an early version flash (v4) so everyone (98% of my visitors) would have it.and to redirect it.

So now, I introduce this question: If it gets penaized for a redirect, why wouldn't someone set up several pages similar to the one above but redirect blatently to the competitor's site to knock them out? It wont do it will it?

[sarahk]

Because it's the page that does the redirecting that gets penalized. And in your case it's the page that does the redirecting that would have the useful content.

[SanDiego]

I see, so the redirect pages gets punished but the page that it redirects to does not. I would have thought they might punish both for some reason. Well, thanks for the info, I have some invisable layers to go sneak in there (& optimize!)

-Rus