As you know I’m always looking for ways to help Flash developers make content accessible to search engines. Today I received a link to a site claiming to have the answer to that age old question, “How to SEO Flash”?
The site claims to have a sample of “SEO SWFAddress 2.0″ code that “provides a better separation between the content and the presentation.” Better than what I’m not sure! Either way, the urls in the “SEO sample” still contain #anchors. Googlebot ignores #anchors in URLs and I’m really hoping “SWFObject 2.0″ isn’t based around such a myth!
A good example of this is Google’s cache of “SEO Sample” portfolio 2.
Here is what the user sees:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/2/?desc=true
As you can see the two pages are different and that is called cloaking!
- Sample from SWFAddress 2.0 Website
I like the Flash SEO posts. It’s definitely something everyone at Adobe wants to have a good solution to. If you ever want to chat about it, let me know.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
This link :
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/portfolio/2/?desc=true
goes to
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/2/?desc=true
that’s why it call SEO example I guess ?
The swfaddress_seo() function transform http://domain.com/folder/ to http://domain.com/#/folder/
“Generally the idea is to have a client-side redirect that produces exactly the same markup as the original page. This is why I call it “non-sneaky redirect” which conforms with the Google guidelines.”
Says Rostislav Hristov from Usual here : http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1879557&forum_id=630933
Someone tell me if Im wrong ?
Florent
Thanks for the comment Ryan, I’ve sent you my contact information via email.
Florent,
“Generally the idea is to have a client-side redirect that produces exactly the same markup as the original page. This is why I call it “non-sneaky redirect” which conforms with the Google guidelines.”
Yes but that is not the case here! Google ignores the URL after except the part prior to the #anchor.
SWFAddress works as advertised. I know because I use it.
Use a text-only web browser to Pull up any SWFAddress website that has been SEOed (try lynx on your comp, or most mobile browsers should do) and you will see exactly what the google bot sees. Yes, this is the same exact page that the regular browser sees, but you obviously get the non-flash content on the text-browser.
If you have a Flash-enabled browser and enter this url:
http://www.website.com/about
you get redirected to this url automatically:
http://www.website.com/#/about
Google sends you to the first URL and you end up at the second… hope that makes sense.
more info at…
http://www.allflashwebsite.com