SEO for Flash based sites and/or applications has always been a hot topic. Depending on the source you’ll very hear different opinions. That’s exactly why Belgian based agency Nascom did their own test a few weeks back. They came to the conclusion that Google can index Flash. You can read more about their test and their findings on their blog.
If you want to find out more about SEO for Flash, you should also check out our recently launched SEO Technology Center. While Adobe and the leading search engines are making significant strides in making SWF content more searchable, you can take additional steps now to improve your search ranking positions further.
The SEO Technology Center helps explain what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.
That’s fantastic news actually, but what i’m asking myself: they say they can spider all the text in the swf. But when you load the text from, let’s say an XML file, they see that link to the xml file as a seperate link and index the xml as a seperate “site”. What about the text in the dynamic textfields, filled in by the text from the xml?
do they only index static textfields or also dynamic textfields?
Hi Mario,
We’ve created a special version of the Flash Player specifically for search engines. This special version codenamed “Ichabod” is perfectly capable of indexing just about everything in your Flash site/application. However, even though it is capable of doing that, it doesn’t mean that search engines like Yahoo and Google have currently implemented it to it’s full potential. Check out Duane’s demo of Ichabod here: http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/flash-search-engine-optimization.html
At FiveHT we’ve been dealing with this issue for years it was always the one missing piece and since we only build using full flash interfaces this had to be solved; so this year we built a new web platform: it drives data, php apps and more, through our flash interface. Its cool; massively scalable, rich media ready and best of all its completely search engine friendly. This occurs not via the disappointing Google plugging that adobe promised would solve the problem, to solve this riddle we had to go back to basics. The system provides search engines exactly what they need to efficiently read all content, links and Meta information a simple easy to read html output. This opens up the door for complete creative freedom while maintaining global web accessibility. To make this magic happen more easily the full function cms platform; not only cuts our website deployment time by more than fifty percent, but it allows our customers complete text, image, rich media and SEO management all in html. Clients can even modify individual page Meta tags and descriptions while the system automatically generates and synchronizes Google XML Sitemaps and HTML Data feeds to ensure reliable and consistent search engine spidering. The result are happy clients who get the best of both worlds exceptional rich media designs, riding entirely on a completely search engine readable base. Problem Solved.. Finally!?
Here is an article I wrote about SEO in Flex …http://www.themorphicgroup.com/blog/2009/06/11/notes-adding-seo-to-a-flex-web-site/ … thanks