Comments on: Update on SWF Indexing Issues

By: Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle: RIA and SEO | Iona.LABS

Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle: RIA and SEO | Iona.LABS — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:07:29 +0000

[...] and searchable. Much written, with no real concrete answers. Lots of tests (A very good one done by Peter Elst), a contest held by Ryan Stewart (Flexmagically Searchable, FTW!), and some well formed opinions [...]

By: Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle: RIA and SEO | Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:50:23 +0000

By: Mitchell Thomas

Mitchell Thomas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:23:34 +0000

Nice article Peter. I wonder what is the use of indexing a swf file that is dependent upon the data (i.e. flashvars) that get passed to it? I’m specifically talking about flash video players and widgets here - but even a flash website that is programmed to respond to deep linking, could potentially have the same problem. It seems that there are a lot of swf files out there that are not very useful outside of the context of the HTML page they are embedded in. And even if the swf can stand by itself one of the reasons we embed them in HTML pages is so the swf can be viewed at the size it was designed to be viewed at. I realize you can set the scaleMode to noScale in actionscript - but what if your application requires scaling?

As for your tests - have you tried filling in the title/description in the Document properties so see how that affects indexing? The title and description are part of the compiled swf, so they should be readable by the Googlebot.

By: Google Indexes SWFs and external content | Fleximagically Searchable | Ryan Stewart's Flex SEO Contest | Circle Cube Studio

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:55:21 +0000

[...] information: I’ve found that’s helpful at Peter Elst’s post. And Ryan explains Google and Flash’s relatoinship development here. Here and here is what [...]

By: Flex SEO Contest - my two first entries | Cyril Hanquez

Flex SEO Contest - my two first entries | Cyril Hanquez — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:05:07 +0000

[...] the comments and concerns regarding SEOing Flash and Flex files, Ryan Stewart decided to launch a contest to [...]

By: Hans Van de Velde

Hans Van de Velde — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:56:03 +0000

When you say that Google will start indexing XML files, I wonder about how Google will be able to interpret the text. For example, what I experienced is that a title-tag or h1,h2,h3,… tags have more weight when your content gets indexed and ul/ol-tags are simply lists of thing.s But when you don’t use HTML, there is no more standard meaning in your content (!)

To prove my point, I also have a funny (quite nicely working) example/experiment I’d like to share here. For one particular website, I used XHTML pages to put my content in (and no XML files as usual). Surprisingly, parsing the XHTML was easier that I thought.
Result: the whole site is fully indexed by Google (yippie !).
You can check this example by typing “site:www.alternativ.be” in Google (even all the images have been indexed too).

When structuring dynamic content it’s important to have tags that are semantically correct. For example, a title in your Flash site should be treated differently than body-text and so on, and so on…

Side note: the Alternativ website itself was built in ActionScript 2 and the content management system with Flex 2 with ActionScript 3 and I must say that with E4X, extracting content from any XHTML page is a breeze.

By: More on the Flex SEO contest | switch for SWFObject to Object/Embed tags | zedia flash blog

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:40:09 +0000

[...] around the fact the Google would not reference website that use javascript to embed the flash file. Peter Elst seems to think the contrary but I think it is worth a try. I was previously using SWFObject to [...]

By: savvas.malamas » Blog Archive » Saving {my} twitter..

savvas.malamas » Blog Archive » Saving {my} twitter.. — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:35:16 +0000

[...] Just because I use it everyday it is obvious that sometimes I tweet things that I might don’t want to be available to the public timeline (Flex doesn’t have a timeline) and especially to search engines (Google please leave my twitter account and try to use Adobe’s help for swf indexing). [...]

By: A Thought About Flash Indexing « Dead Ink Vinyl

A Thought About Flash Indexing « Dead Ink Vinyl — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:15:37 +0000

[...] has announced the Flex SEO Contest to encourage the community to establish best practices for Flash/Flex indexing. The rules are straightforward and the top prize is CS4 Master Collection. I like the challenge and [...]

By: Gerd Kamp

Gerd Kamp — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:52:41 +0000

We are also in urgent need of some place to put robots info / crawling restrictions.

At work we make use of remote calls to xml files e.g. for our live event tickers . In addition to our reporting we also include near-time stats and position data. This data is licensed to us under the condition that it is not (easily) publicly available.

The application and the data is then pushed to our customers sites (e.g. around 100 newspapers, publishers and portals for EURO2008). Since these sites are not ours we do not have access to the robots.txt files. Using META tags is also not an option since we are using XML files.

Switching over to serving the data files only from servers that are under our control is (currently) not an option.

So where do we put the robots infos? Google/Adobe? I guess there are more having the exact same problems. Some clarification would definitely help

All this would not be an issue if instead of indexing the xml file etc. separately. Google would use the information in order to link back to the originating swf file.