Indexing a Flash site on Google

August 15th, 2008

Our approach to Flash SEO (and accessibility)

There’s been alot of press lately regarding the new found viability of Flash and search indexing. Whether the improvements in the Flash player quantify to leaps in plug-in SEO or nothing more than than a puff in the wind.

In my opinion there’s little change in Flash SEO capabilities. Google have been indexing Flash files for sometime, and there’s been little formal evidence to suggest that a SWF can alter your search result position in anyway.

During a recent in-house project we came across this very issue and attempted to create our own style of Flash indexing for the site. After recent review it appears to be working brilliantly and has sucessfully managed to promote the indexing of textual content for each Flash page uniquely within Google search results.

The technical solution was a combination of Apache mod_rewrite, PHP (SimpleXML), SWFAddress (for SWFObject) and some bespoke JavaScript holding it all together. With the Flash site popualted via an XML document and utilizing SWFAddress to create a historical (back button) record of pages visited within the SWF. It was a case of converting the internal SWFAddress URIs (that use a standard hash technique that all AJAX based apps use) to a standard URL and preventing 404’s by mod_rewrite. Then once a URI is registered on the server, it serves up the index HTML with a parsed text-only version of the content, promoting indexing for search bots, and converting a standard URI to a hashed version via JavaScript (in the case that JS was activated and Flash was installed).

Whilst this approach may seem longwinded, it allowed us to generate an accessible, indexable site that offered the correct content delivery for relevant client platform (HTML or Flash). Improving the search ratings of the site and promoting deeplinked Flash pages.

Start Creative currently operates this system on their agency portfolio site, and I for one, am pretty proud of the achievement. Examples of the indexable links:
http://www.startcreative.co.uk/adidas/hub/, http://www.startcreative.co.uk/bbc/case_02_dsdWebsite/

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Flash, PHP, Actionscript, Javascript, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response below, or trackback from your own site.

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