Flash, Flex and SEO

During the flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles I read a book that I wait for long time and finally arrive a couple of months ago but I’ve never started to read before.

The book is Search Engine Optimization for Flash by Todd Perkins, the first that talks about this argument and also about how to make your Flex RIA searchable from spiaders, so I was so exciting before start to read.

My final impression is that you don’t need to read this book if you are a developer because there aren’t new things to do…
I can resume the book in those few best practices:

  • Use SWFObject because make your SWF file more easy to read for spiders
  • Use SWFAddress or URLKit to rewrite url of your page but it’s useful only for RIA or site usability, not for SEO because HTML is the same for all pages, change only the page url.
  • Avoid to develop a full flash site if you are interested to indexing your project
  • Remember to “talk” with spiders via META tag in HTML page
  • One of most important thing is to make a relevant title of your HTML page
  • With FP 10 you don’t make anything to indexing your contents (dynamic or static text) because spider navigate trough SWF file to retrieve informations
  • Remember that you can set XMP file for your Flash project but until now, search engines don’t use those informations

I think that’s all, I hope to find more about how can create searchable content with Flash (there is a good PDF file in adobe website) but I think that there is no way.
We are only at the beginning of a big mountain and I hope that Adobe starts to make something new in next few months… maybe at MAX 2009 also, but I really don’t know.

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luca mezzalira

Being associated with the industry since 2004, I have lent my expertise predominantly in the solution architecture field. I have gained accolades for revolutionising the scalability of frontend architectures with micro-frontends, from increasing the efficiency of workflows, to delivering quality in products. My colleagues know me as an excellent communicator who believes in using an interactive approach for understanding and solving problems of varied scopes. I helped DAZN becoming a global streaming platform in just 5 years, now as Principal Architect at AWS, I'm helping our customers in the media and entertainment space to deliver cost-effective and scalable cloud solutions. Moreover, I'm sharing with the community the best practices to develop cloud-native architectures solving technical and organizational challenges. My core industry knowledge has been instrumental in resolving complex architectural and integration challenges. Working within the scopes of a plethora of technical roles such as tech lead, solutions architect and CTO, I have developed a precise understanding of various technicalities which has helped me in maximizing value of my company and products in my current leadership roles.

5 thoughts on “Flash, Flex and SEO”

  1. Hi there !

    Use SWFAddress or URLKit to rewrite url of your page but it’s useful only for RIA or site usability, not for SEO because HTML is the same for all pages, change only the page url.

    Actually it’s not totally true. I usually put an .htaccess file on my webserver that takes the query string in swfaddress format. I parse it and send it to the php file who return the right html formatted content from url arguments.

    So when spiders come to the main page, they find links in swfaddress format and when they check those links, the server send the right pages with the right content !
    Then you can find specific pages in google, and if you click the link, you arrive on the swfaddress url which redirect your flash to the requested category.

    Hope this help 🙂

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