Flash 8 12 Dec 2006 07:20 pm
Making Flash websites searchable
Jeff Kamerer, software engineer on the Flash team, wrote a good article back in mid-October about making Flash websites searchable. I wanted to point it out for those of you who may not have heard about it because I regularly get asked about the subject. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of info out there, but we’re working hard to change that. We’re also in the process of working on technical solutions to improve searchability with SWFs by working with the various search engine vendors.
If you’d like to learn more about your current options, check out Jeff’s article on the Adobe Developer Center.
on 12 Dec 2006 at 11:24 pm 1.greg h said …
Subsequent to Jeff’s article, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced support for the SiteMaps protocol.
John Dowdell suggests SiteMaps are yet another tool for enhancing SWF visibility to SEO. See John’s comments here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/search_tech/index.cfm
Learn more about SiteMaps here:
http://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html
And for yet more on SEO and SWF, also see this other Devnet article by Bobby van der Sluis of Refunk:
Developing Flash websites using progressive enhancement
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/progressive_enhancement.html
Happy Flashing!
g
on 12 Dec 2006 at 11:36 pm 2.Algis said …
Thanks Mike for the link to an article. I don’t know how, but somehow I missed it in October.
on 13 Dec 2006 at 6:14 am 3.Ian said …
I have to say, I found the subtext of Jeff’s article very negative. Surely as a representative of Adobe he should be extolling the benefits and countering the myths? The Flash platform is a technology like any other, and provided it is used competently there shouldn’t necessarily be an issue. The real issue is that of exposing content to users who are unable to “view” that which is rendered by the flash player.
I work on an application which leverages the Flash platform in order to present a rich, intuitive experience for non-technical website authors. The application has evolved over many years and in recent releases we have focused on ensuring that sites built using our software expose their content as well as any HTML only solution. Many of the sites built using our software achieve high search engine rankings.
http://www.moonfruitlounge.com/post/2006/11/17/SiteMaker-Flash-and-Search-Engine-Optimisation
Thanks.
Ian
on 18 Dec 2006 at 3:52 am 4.Tink said …
“For human visitors, it is impossible to bookmark a particular page because going back to that same link will take them to the beginning of the Flash experience”
Bookmarking can be achieved by using deep linking within your SWF’s so that aint quite true.