Flash Simulation

This text starts life hidden. The biggest test of the value of this technique is whether it gets indexed.

If you look at the Google PR on your toolbar (you do have the google toolbar don't you?) and it's ranked then you should also be able to do a search on

crumpets rimu bonanza

What do this group of words mean? Absolutely nothing and I'm counting on no other website having them so that a search on those words will turn up this page. I don't have these words anywhere else on my site or in this document, just in this hidden layer.

If you can't find it, then you know that Google doesn't like this scripting technique and what Google doesn't like isn't worth publishing.

View the source to see the code. I've left the javascript on the page, in a real life situation I'd move it to a separate file.

13 November 2003

Not bad, it's taken just over a month and this page is sitting at:

• #1 for it's bogus keywords;
• #3 for jimworld layers google; and
• #7 for flash simulation

So, I guess this technique does work and can be used with care.

• No waits for the page to reload. Other page content is still available while the page loads.
• You can move the most important "page" to the top of the file, thus increasing it's importance from the Search Engine's perspective.
• Graphics are preloaded so if a user is reading the introduction the images are likely to be loaded when the page is requested. This is an advantage when a user will read all the "pages", for instance in a tutorial or "story".

• A visitor who only wants to view part of the site still has to wait for all the content to load.
• Search Engines will get a diluted message about the purpose of the page. Many people believe that it is better to have many focussed page rather than a single all purpose page.
• Search Engines may disregard any text with "visibility:hidden". If you view the source of this page you will see that all the content is loaded as hidden.
• Relies on Javascript.
• Graphics are preloaded without control over the order that they are loaded. Therefore hidden pages may be loaded before the current (or selected) page. There are other ways to control image preloading.

• Mortgage Calculator - Space is tight and in the original version the results were fed into "input" fields. I wanted to add the tick and cross indicators to mark whether the rent will pay the mortgage so this needed to be very efficient.
  See the Mortgage Calculator live at the PropertyTalk website.
  This technology was used for the layout benefits, not for SEO purposes.
• A thread at PHP Builder discussed how to hide a page until it's loaded and I used the example to build a case where this technique can make it happen.