Shadow Page for Flash Experience

[mozcrush]

Hello.

I am curious to better understand what I've been told are "shadow pages" for Flash experiences.

So for example, go here: 
http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx#/home

View the page as Googlebot and you'll see an HTML page. It is completely different than the Flash page.

1. Is this ok?
2. If I make my shadow page mirror the Flash page, can I put links in it that lead the user to the same places that the Flash experience does?
3. Can I put "Pinterest" Pin-able images in my shadow page?
3. Can a create a shadow page for a video that has the transcript in it? Is this the same as closed captioning?

Thanks so much in advance,

-GoogleCrush

[mozcrush]

Is this a silly question, that's why no one has answered? Maybe I'm missing something or have asked too many questions in one...

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi GoogleCrush

Sorry for the late response. I wont pretend to be an expert on this, but I'll give you my best assessment of the situation.

Generally, it's best practices on script heavy pages to include alternate information for degraded viewing experiences. Typically this is accomplished with the

<noscript>tag. You can see this effect if you turn off javascript (you can use the MozBar) for this and view the page. For this Walmart page, this view exactly matches Google's text cache of the page....</p> <p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx&hl=en&strip=1">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Kraft.aspx&hl=en&strip=1</a></p> <p>Typically, this is fine and even considered best practices for usability. You can get into some trouble areas if the content of your degraded experience doesn't match your rich flash or javascript experience, but it's hard to tell where the line is drawn.</p> <p>As far as adding links to this area, yes, you can and should add links to the same destination as your flash experience.</p> <p>You can include images in this area, but without scripting I'm not sure how "Pin-able" they would be. Not sure I'm too clear on this question.</p> <p>As for video transcripts.... I'm really unsure about this point. From a usability standpoint, it might make sense to include a video transcript. That said, include huge paragraphs of text not visible to normal users could send the wrong signal. Best practices would be to include the video transcript for all users - the way SEOmoz does for Whiteboard Friday.</p> <p>Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!</p></noscript>