Flash & SEO (Part II)
Andreas was kind enough to call my attention to a different perspective of the SWF Searchability news, expressed in the article titled SWF indexing is a red herring, and you should all know that by now. I have to agree that there is still some room for improvement, so far as indexing dynamically loaded (XML, HTML, etc) content in SWF files. Even so, I am quite confident that it is just a matter of time before Google/Yahoo figure out how to effectively identify and interpret dynamically loaded content for SWF files and, in turn, associate the content with the parent Flash site.
So far as the JavaScript limitation is concerned, if we all (as good developers) follow best practices in implementing Flash JavaScript tools for getting around the inherent “click-to-activate” (IE 6/7, Opera 9+, etc.) browser issue, then whether or not the Google/Yahoo WebCrawler can interpret JavaScript should be a non-issue.
- If you are implementing the JavaScript SWFObject 2.0 codebase (and you really should), you can provide alternative HTML content not only as a solution for the SEO problem, but also as a channel for providing content to (the relatively few) web users who do not have a Flash player installed, or users who do not have JavaScript-enabled browsers or maybe for those users who turn-off JavaScript while browsing the web. See the code snippet below.
- Now, if you are still using the old school “AC_FL_RunContent” JavaScript method to get around the “click-to-activate” browser issue, you might want to implement the <noscript> tag, for the same reasons mentioned earlier.
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Code Snippet for implementing the SWFObject 2.0 codebase:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Embed Flash in my HTML: Sample Code</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF("myflashvideo.swf", "content", "300",
"120", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf");
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
My alternative HTML content for users who don't have a Flash
player installed or a JavaScript-enabled Web Browser.
</div>
</body>
</html>
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If you are bent on providing a truly SEO- and User-friendly Flash site, I recommend checking out the SWFObject codebase wiki!
Flash and SEO (search engine optimization) solutions have lived poles apart for as long as either one of them was invented. Several web design and development houses have moved away from Flash/Flex implementations because of this constraint.
The flash searchability is overrated, google will list each xml feed as its own page. Lame..
See http://ladg.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/swf-searchability-finally/
Cheers
Andreas