Archive for the 'Search Engine Optimization' Category

Google has been indexing SWF:s using their new techniques for a couple of weeks now, and it should be possible to see what it really means. I was very critical in my last post on the subject, and some of the things I have been proven wrong about, but it seems that so far I have been mostly right, nothing has really changed.

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So, here we go again, Google has annonced that they will index SWF files with a new algorithm and the whole Flash blogosphere echobox is ringing with the words of the clueless. The announcement shows how little Google understands about Flash websites and needlessly diverts the attention away from developing a real solution to Flash website search engine optimization. The reaction to Google’s announcement also shows how little the Flash bloggers understand about the problem. I’m not sure which of these two is the most annoying.

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Some jokers who call themselves flexinmotion have released a ridiculously overpriced Flex component which “will automatically track all user navigation clicks, button click, check boxes, radio buttons and a number of other controls within your app automatically” using Google Analytics. Let me show you how to save those 149 bucks.

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It’s probably the number one topic on Flash blogs today: O’Reilly launches InsideRIA and has an article about how Google indexes SWF files. As usual when it comes to SEO and Flash, almost no one understands what it means, but almost everyone talks about it as the New Big Thing. Guess what? It’s not.
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In Flex 3 there is support for deep linking in the BrowserManager class. Unfortunately it requires that you use the Flex HTML templates which, frankly, are really ugly. I prefer to use SWFObject to embed my Flash and Flex applications. To solve this I have created a simple package that makes it possible to use the BrowserManager class with SWFAddress. You can find it and a description on what it does here: Flex BrowserManager + SWFAddress integration.

Google Analytics is a really good web site statistics tool, but there are some things that haven’t worked so well for me. The Flash version names include revision numbers, which makes it hard to get the whole picture, and when having multiple subdomains in the same profile it’s not easy to see which domain an page belongs to. Both these can be fixed with filters, and in this post I show you how.

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I came across this interview with Dan Crow of Google. I’ll use that interview as a basis for a discussion on Flash and search engine optimization. The conclusion is that too many are talking about indexing SWF files, which is a non-problem, basically the same as saying that JavaScript files should be indexed.

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Have a look at the sidebar of gBlog. It’s such a bad use of Flash. Sure, it looks neat with the rollovers, the “+ show more” and the tiny scrollbars, but it’s oh so stupid.

What do you do when presented with a list of links that all look interesting? You cmd-click (or whatever you do in Windows) them to open each one in its own tab or in a new window. Try. Didn’t work? Well, no surprise really, because the whole sidebar is a Flash application, which doesn’t work that way. So now you have to click the links, one by one, and each one will take you from the original site.

You open the links in tabs, you can’t copy the links and what’s more, the links are not visible to Google, there is no graceful degradation here.

I find that really, really stupid. Pity, because it’s not a bad blog otherwise.

I gave you my home-grown solution on how to handle reload and bookmarks in Flash applications a few weeks back, and now its time to revise it. The reason is the newly released SWFAddress extension to SWFObject, which solves the same issues as my previous solution, but also handles the back button.

I don’t care very much for the example code given at the SWFAddress site, so I’m going to show you a proper object oriented solution for all your state handling needs.

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Using the external interface, and a simple JavaScript, you can make your Flash applications bookmarkable, and also accidental-reload-safe. In this article I’ll show you a simple and minimal way of doing it.

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