SEO on Flash
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- mrock
is this possible now? What's the latest? how is it possible? How does swfaddress tie in with this? I know I can google this for days, but I wanted to get some ideas from you folks. Thanks in advance...
- trooperbill0
kind of possible... it doesnt work out of the box and you have to use work arounds and do things a specific way... its still crap if you're serious about good search marketing.
- jpea0
swfaddress generally has no effect on it, but swfobject definitely does. Loading content into you swf as XML works great, then you can reuse that XML using a server-side tech and dump it into your div that swfobject overwrites. Lately, also Google is able to parse a swf AND the js that embeds the swf, so XML docs should be able to be found if they're pulled into Flash, as well as static text used in your swf. Flash certainly isn't ideal, but it's definitely on the up and up and can bring about great SEO results when used in the right ways.
- jpea0
- mrock0
thanks for the excellent reponses.
jpea - I'm a little familiar with sever-side tech, but what I'm understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, that the xml is in between a <div> tag but hidden using css? Is there a sample? thanks man.
- jpea0
On many of things I build, I just use php or aspx pages to parse the same xml file I used in the flash portion, then have it dump that data out into the div that swfobject writes the flash swf to. CSS isn't hiding that div, rather that swfobject/javascript is rewriting the data that's in the div. Google generally doesn't parse javascript, so anything in that div should show up in search. I'm not sure how it'll work as they begin parsing the js->swf now from that article I linked to, but if it's the same data used for both I wouldn't think it would matter either way.
If you view the source at http://prestonkelly.com (or visit the page with javascript turned off) you can maybe see what I mean. I used php to parse the same XML that the Flash portion uses to write out links to sections within that site.
- jpea0
Or look at a similar method at schematic.com
- mrock0
ah nice! The url is changing at the top for every section I clicked on flash. is that "swfaddress" doing it's work?