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.
lucamezzalira.com 
Hi there !
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 🙂
Well, Adobe might come up with a new program as it has developed may programs that are popularly used around the world by many of us.
You may enjoy reading a post I have made recently about Adobe’s urgent need to update their FLASH PLAYER to allow deep linking to be better indexed by search engines. The post is found on Adobe’s site Forum on Flex here : http://forums.adobe.com/message/2575724#2575724