Seriously? where is my first question?! is it deleted?

[M4G1C14N]

Did you delete my first question?

where is it? I cant find it on My Questions....

And if it is deleted i NEED to know why, i am currently on trial for PRO MEMBERSHIP, and getting my question deleted without any news is definitely not a good idea.... If i did something wrong, i need to know what is it.... (i dont understand , how on this green earth asking a question would be wrong though)

Please responds,

PS :

My Last question was posted on "On-Page / Site Optimization"

It asked 3 questions, all related to Search Engine Visibility, and the primary question is about "If i used php script to detect google bot / yahoo bot / bing bot, and then redirect them to page that have EXACTLY same content, but a much more SEO Friendly one, will this effect my seo standing"

The website in question is http://atlantagenset.com

In which case that website is full flash BUT it can be opened through any phone (I have built a php that detected IF you are coming from any mobile devices, it will redirect you to the right HTML version of that page)

arghhhh i have asked the question, and have not got any responds for 6~7 days, and it got deleted??!

[randfish]

If you go ahead, unfortunately, there's no warning from Google (in Webmaster Tools or elsewhere) about penalties. You'll sometimes see a message after the penalty is in place (but sometimes not at all). If it does happen, you can typically fix it, request re-consideration in Webmaster Tools, and within a few weeks to months, they'll lift it (presuming you've made the fix). That penalty/re-consideration process can be quite painful, though.

In the event it happens, there's no long-term impact to PageRank/Authority/link metrics about the site.

Best of luck,
Rand

[M4G1C14N]

Rand, Thanks a lot, i have got a lot of information from those blog post (including every single comment and the link provided on some of those comment). And wow... I will tell you this, if i were asked RIGHT NOW what is the most important thing i could get from a PRO MEMBERSHIP is not the pro tool BUT to get my 2 credited questions answered in such an insightful manner.. (I am looking for a fish , and the answer for my question including every single blog post in this site IS the technique of how to fish that i really need!)

I have learnt a lot from this, and this has seal the deal that i will continue the pro membership when it expired.

I am so certain that in my case it will fall into the Near White - Light Gray category , because although i did redirect google, but i redirect them to a page that has exactly the same content as the Flash Version , and not to mention it is the redirection i did for the user too (when they browse the site from their mobile phone), so i masked absolutely nothing  (i hide nothing, every single text word by word is represented in both the Flash Version and HTML Version, and in fact even their location is pixel perfectly placed).

With that said... That is not the way of how a businessman judges matter. We always asked ourself "What if the worse happened?".

So here is the followup question , i know you have answered it in your comment (but considering it happened 2 years ago++, you might have different answer now)

Just in case if my site got taken out of the index (banned ? ) , do i get any prior warning in my google webmaster tools? And how to get my site re-indexed when such thing happened? do i need just to remove the redirect and everything will be fine again? (Page Rank retained, domain authority is not tarnished in any mean, etc) .

I can try to create the most SEO Friendly initial page, but it will take a lot of time, and time is something i cant spare (unless it is absolutely necessary).. I can easily make the Initial Page = the exact homepage, but when the Flash is detected, the javascript will rewrite everysingle thing and put the MAIN Flash Movie inside (caused a lot of unnecessary overhead for the visitors)

Cheers and God Bless,

Chowi

[randfish]

Hi Chowi - this is a thorny issue, and unfortunately, the answer to your follow-up regarding redirecting the bots is "maybe."

What I mean is - maybe the engines will be fine with it because the content matches exactly, but there are cases we've observed where they've been upset or penalized the pages/site. This blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful) does a good job of showing cases where this type of cloaking happens and Google is fine with it, but as you can see from Matt Cutts' response in the comments, they really don't like most sites to do this.

If I were in your shoes, I'd look for a way to make that initial page as search-friendly as possible, but if you're fairly sure that the engines will see your content precisely the same and are willing to adopt some risk from that perspective, you could do the redirect. As I said, many big sites do get away with this behavior.

[M4G1C14N]

Oh i did not notice the new system has taken place. Anyway i couldnt reply on the old system, so i have to reply here, i hope you dont mind.

First off, thanks to you and rand for answering my question. and I have couple of responds for the answers, to clarify many things

#1A. The problem for LINK Sharing on twitter can be easily solved, i just need to put the right URL for tweeting button (and perhaps even for share button / email to friend button). For manual sharing and email , we can easily create a LINKTO field inside the website, so that people can copy the right link (although admittedly if they take the link from their Browsers Address, it could lead to the potential lose of backlink to that page. On facebook however, is another can full of worms, because their 'like' features do not allow the developer to post different URL, it will autodetect current URL (however i will see to this if there is any work around it myself by diving into the FBXML)

#1B. Okay i dont have any problem with this too, because all content inside the flash content is a fully dynamic content, A.K.A the swf the browser load is totally empty, void of any picture, text, design, layout, etc . Everything including the layout is loaded dynamically on the fly. And i am so certain that no search engine can ever crawl to this. so i wont have any duplicate content

#1C. Indeed, it is ideal. My company is a web development company that creates its own Engine (with easy to use CMS), last year our engine can only output the Flash Version, this year we can output both the Flash Version and HTML Version, and why we stick to the normal XHTML 1.0 (with css 2.1) and not HTML 5.0 (with css 3.0) because not all mobile browser can handle HTML 5.0 (hell even the firefox vs chrome vs opera vs ie9 all have different kind of unsupported feature on css3), which defeat the purpose of us having the engine to output the HTML Version, which is to allow our client's visitor to be able to open their site from their phone (not exclusive to smart phone)

#2 Glad to know that it is fine

#3 The AJAX Crawling uses HTML Snapshot which is what we used exactly (but ours is much more advanced, complicated, because the original version is a Flash Version which has absolutely NO HTML, so snapshoting the EXACT page into a HTML Version, and dynamically update the HTML Version when the Content inside the Flash Version changes is so damn complicated, but hey we have finished it , and it works perfectly)

for example the FLASH URL

http://atlantagenset.com/#/item-category/genset-bekas.html

has a PERFECT HTML Snapshot in this URL

http://atlantagenset.com/item-category/genset-bekas.html

I only have 1 Follow up question, to seal my original question as solved

1. My follow up question is a repeat my original and most dire question, CAN i  implement the redirect when google bot / yahoo bot / bing bot go to my root homepage to the HTML Version homepage without penalizing my SEO Standing (without the #1A, #1B, #1C concerns) ?? I am concerned with Alan Mosley's answer, that i might get flagged. I certainly dont want to show different content to the Crawler then what i show to the Visitors, Content wise there is ABSOLUTELY no changes, no masking whatsoever, it is only to make the dynamic Content inside the Flash Version understandable for Crawler (Like what Google itself suggesting in http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ )

this redirect is specific to when google bot / yahoo bot / bing bot opened the http://atlantagenset.com (because any other pages inside this URL IS a HTML Version, only the http://atlantagenset.com contain the FLASH Version)

Example when google bot crawl this http://atlantagenset.com page

My PHP Script detected this, and redirect the google bot to http://atlantagenset.com/menu/home.html

the redirect php script i used is

header('Location: ' . $TargetURL);

Remember my redirect scenario is only for when google bot / yahoo bot / bing bot crawled the http://atlantagenset.com ONLY , and not any other page such as http://atlantagenset.com/menu/about-us.html , etc

Before and after, thanks a lot for the time invested in answering my question , i am so grateful, especially when you mentioned the "Social Networking" bits , it raised more question that is not related to the original answer, but i do have a follow up question about it, BUT should i not be questioning in here (since i already used both of my questions credit) then i dont really mind to ask them next month

The Follow up question about Social Networking bits

So are you saying that Google / Yahoo / Bing do crawl the facebook , tweeter page? even though the tweeter page uses the Short URL Version of the original URL?

Or you are only saying that it will help to make the site much more popular hence it will generate more click to our site hence making the Page Rank of that page raised a lot higher?

Cheers and God Bless,

Chowi

[caseyhen]

Hi Taufix,

It seems the question you are referring to is on our old Q&A system and your question can be found at the link below where  Rand answered it today.

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/52213

I've copied and pasted his answer below for you.  Feel free to respond in either the new or old system and check out the blog post where we talk about the release of our new Q&A system.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-pro-qa

Hi Chowi - so sorry for our long delay! We've been launching the new Q+A and got a bit backlogged. Hopefully I can be of help.

#1 - There's a few SEO issues, but what you're doing can/should potentially work. The problems are:

A) Users who link to / tweet / share / email content around will likely get the Flash version(s) and may not be sharing internal content/pages (or linking to the correct URLs for the mobile/HTML/search-friendly version). That sucks, but if you're more concerned with just being indexed/crawled and not competitive rankings, it's less of an issue.

B) If the engines are crawling inside the Flash (via SWFObject or some othe engine-readable format), it could mean duplicate content.

C) In an ideal world, I might think about HTML 5, which allows for Flash-like interfaces while being SEO/Mobile friendly and device agnostic.

#2 - That redirect should be fine - it's what lots of Flash sites do and the engines shouldn't have a problem. The nasty bit, of course, is that users linking/sharing the Flash URL likely won't be crawled/parsed properly by Google, which bites.

#3 - As I mentioned, HTML 5 could be a quite nice solution, or even mixing HTML and Flash such that the URLs have Flash on them, but aren't "all Flash" so the URLs map properly, etc. These aren't prefect solutions, of course, but they're possibilities. One more thing - you might want to look into Google's new AJAX crawling, which could apply depending on how you build your app. http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/

All the best!

Rand

[AlanMosley]

Yes it will affect your standing big time. dont do it.

Your second question about the mobile redirect, is not so cut and dry. flash for a start is next to usless if you want to rank in search engines, and sending users and search engines to diffrent pages will get you flaged.
you caoild have a page that asks the user if he wants mobile of web, but sending automaticlly is sending se and users to different pages.