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November 16, 2006
SWF SEO RIP?
SWF SEO RIP? For years we've heard "flash can't search", that using SWF on a site means search engines won't find you. Hasn't been true, but the story keeps recurring. Maybe today's announcement will change that: "Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it." The FAQ describes something like Resource Description Files, but without the newest-first ordering of RSS feeds. Lots of commentary, too. I'll be glad if this squashes objections to richer media or advanced interactivity, just on the basis that search spiders don't sense it.
Posted by JohnDowdell at November 16, 2006 08:54 AM
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Using SiteMaps certainly helps with ensuring pages get spidered (it's basically just a way of listing URLs to request indexing), but putting core hypertext content into Flash will still either result in inferior SEO or require extra workarounds.
(Rich media and advanced interactive features are never going to be indexed conventionally anyway, so Flash is and always has been superb for embedding such things into sites)
Posted by: Matt Round at November 16, 2006 11:27 AM
Using some tricks you can achieve deep linking and SEO for Flash websites. Try these out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=swfaddress+suspendisse
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=swfaddress+suspendisse
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=swfaddress+suspendisse
[jd sez: Source info here, and Geoff Stearns has further context. The script uses browser/plugin intercommunication to give the browser information about application state. This is straightforward; the tricky part is figuring out what your application's states actually are, and then there's a smaller chore of handling noncompliant browsers. Text discovery for search spiders is a step beyond bookmarking, but is achievable, as the above terms prove. This technique seems extraneous to the main point of this post, however: the few search engine spiders no longer control your ability to be found, and responsibility has shifted outwards to the world, to the old innovation of a site hosting a file describing its resources.]
Posted by: Rostislav at November 17, 2006 07:29 AM
Using some tricks you can achieve deep linking and SEO for Flash websites
Hi,I got http://www.asil2000.com/legume_fructe/poze_mere.swf with PR 3.I wish links from any picture to rest of my site. Is any solutions to be indexed those links by Google?(sorry for my english:)
Thanks
[jd sez: Figure out which search terms people would likely use when trying to find you, check that you have a realistic chance of placing highly on those terms (there's lots of competition for simple terms like "beans"), then title your pages, bodytext, metadata, and filepaths with appropriate terms, and get plenty of appropriate links from legitimate sources. Search engines really don't recognize what's in an image, so your normal HTML work needs to provide those clues.]
Posted by: fructe at June 5, 2007 06:05 AM
ps: Thanks for "nofollow" :D
Posted by: fructe at June 5, 2007 08:11 AM
I``m afraid to use flash: Google don`t read toi well...
[jd sez: Google is a corporation, and has no eyes to read at all. You and I are lucky in comparison.]
Posted by: Andreea at October 19, 2007 08:25 PM