I am planning to build a website completely in Flex. All the contents will be static. No DB will be used. Unfortunately I am not building the website for PUMA or NIKE and so SEO is important. There is an overwhelming and confusing information out there about Flex and SEO.
The following is a piece of information I found on the web
" FLEX( Flash ) uses XML as a primary source of content, and XHTML is just a custom XML. The idea is to to use the HTML pages as XML content for the FLEX( Flash ) application. The XML can be read and indexed by the search engines, and it’s also the ideal content source for your FLEX( Flash ) application.' It goes on to explain how this can be done. Is this really that simple. "
Could someone give some credible links. SEO is important for me.
If I'm really worried about SEO, I'm not building my site using Flex, Flash or Silverlight. A large part of SEO comes from the search engines crawling the content on your site's pages and analyzing the links into and out of your site. When you create a site using Flash or Silverlight, you're making it a lot harder for search engines to crawl your content.
If you're determined to use Flex for your website, I would recommend reading:
Revisiting Deep Linking with Flex from Jonathon Campos's blog
How to make your hot new RIA friendly to search engines from Josh Tynjala
Search Engine Optimization Technology Center by Adobe Developer Connection (Lots of resources here)
You'll also want to make your URLs as SEO friendly as possible (ex. http://www.yoursite.com/articles/my-article-about-flex/).
Related
I wrote a trivia game in Flex (flash). The site is written entirely in Flex. Almost all of the text is pulled from a database. It also has a fair number of images. The image file paths are pulled from the db.
My site's not getting any hits. If I check on google site:mysite it the url appears only. I know that inbound links are important and I'll try to get some. At the moment, I don't have any inbound links. In google webmaster tools, if I look under the site's keywords, there are 0. My sites been up for about a month.
Any suggestions on how to improve this situation?
(I've seen a few people ask for help with Flash SEO and the comments tended to be of the "don't use Flash" variety-- which aren't too helpful if you've written something in Flex/Flash).
Thank you.
-Laxmidi
Check out this article: Read Here
SEO FLASH PROGRAMMING
My recommended Flash SEO method uses a
DIV with search-engine-accessible,
primary content, and an open source
Javascript function called swfobject()
to detect when browsers are capable of
viewing Flash. When an appropriate
version of Flash player is present,
the Javascript manipulates the page's
document object model (DOM) to replace
the primary content with the Flash
movie. Most search engine spiders
can't handle Flash, so they will elect
to view the primary content. The
primary content may contain links,
headings, styled text, images—anything
we can add to an ordinary HTML page.
With SEO copyediting and coding skills
applied to the primary content, Flash
becomes a non-issue.
Flash accessibility programming isn't
spamming, as long as the primary
content and the visible movie are
essentially the same. The World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility
Initiative (WAI) specifically states
that multimedia content should have an
alternative representation available.
Accessibility programming creates the
benefit of presenting visual
information without losing the
visitors and search engines who depend
upon textual content.
As of July 2007, I discussed this
method with Dan Crow of Google. He
warned that this programming method
could draw attention because of the
possibility for abuse. If you use this
method, make sure the alternative
content is a faithful representation
of the Flash content, and avoid
combining this with other coding
methods that could be abused. While
this SEO method is not abusive, it is
aggressive because there is a small
risk that the search engines could
mistakenly decide that the primary
content is a form of cloaking.
I would also create a sitemap and link to multiple keyword rich landing pages about your game with a link back to the game. The more content google has to bite into the better changes someone will find you.
You also need to market your site...just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. Use twitter, facebook and any other form of social media to get the word out. You may also try buying a few bucks worth of ad words to start the ball rolling.
The solution to only the url appearing in Google is probably as simple as adding a meta description tag.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html
It would also probably be beneficial to provide a description or instructions for the trivia game in HTML alongside the Flex part of the website, if this is possible.
If I developed my webpage entirely using Flex, is it searchable by Google and other search engines?
Thank you very much.
Yes. Google can.
If your browser can show you the contents of your flash object, for Google there is no reason to fail.
Check this article on Flash indexing on Google.
The answer is... you're probably taking the wrong approach if you are presenting your Flex app to be indexed.
Allegedly, Google has a Flash Player which allows indexing of Flash content, but no-one has ever seen it in the wild or had it confirm it's actually real.
The best way to approach this is to have an HTML landing page which links to your Flex application. The HTML page gets indexed, and your Flex app doesn't care. If there are things in your App which must be indexed, are you sure Flash was the right approach for it in the first place?
I've seen a lot of web sites use Flex/Flash objects only were needed, like 1 or more rich UI controls on the page. The rest is still HTML. That way you get the best of both worlds, and keep the site fairly simple (important to me), plus the we page is still searchable.
However, to answer your question, yes Google has been working on Flash site indexing algorithms:
Google learns to crawl Flash
More info:
SWF searchability FAQ
Making Flash websites searchable
I am working on a website completely designed in Flex (flash).Can you please help suggesting whether search engines (like google/bing) can index flash content or not.If not then how do the websites made entirely in flash make themselves available on these search engines.
Thanks for your help.
If I recall correctly, Google does index Flash nowadays. Here's an article on how to make Flash pages available to Google. The Adobe SWF searchability FAQ also has useful information.
The article points towards a tool called swf2html which can be downloaded from Adobe (after registering) and extracts a HTML page from the text and links in the SWF. This allows you to view the SWF the way search engines see it, and optimize accordingly.
Google's a good place to start. Several links regarding how Google indexes flash content from this search.
Assuming the following:
You have some content currently being displayed in an ASP.NET HTML table.
You want to use Silverlight for a better user experience.
It is important that the information be indexed in Google, et al.
What do you do? I know that XAP (Silverlight executables) contain XAML which could theoretically be indexed. But will Google do this? And if so, when? And what if the data being served up is not in the XAML (perhaps it is stored as a resource)?
My first thought is to try to detect search engines and serve up the HTML table. But my limited understanding of SEO makes me wonder whether Google would frown on this practice and possibly black-list the site. And I am not sure how reliable it is to try to detect the search engines anyway.
Is there a definitive correct way to do this which won't get you in trouble with Google?
Search engine optmization is possible in silver light go thru the following link
SEO
This is an excellent article with a slide-show on 'Search Engine Friendly Silverlight Applications' from a Software Architect at Microsoft :
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=200
This MSDN blog post on 'Simple Silverlight SEO with ASP.Net and XSLT' will also be of interest :
http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2007/10/03/simple-silverlight-seo-with-asp-net-and-xslt.aspx
Progressive Enhancement. Use the basic HTML table. Use JavaScript to replace the table with the richer interface.
Since Silverlight is still verey limited in browser/OS support, I'd advise to steer clear of it for public webpages, or at least provider traditional alternatives as well, which will then be indexable by search engines.
How would you make the contents of Flex RIA applications accessible to Google, so that Google can index the content and shows links to the right items in your Flex RIA. Consider a online shop, created in Flex, where the offered items shall be indexed by Google. Then a link on Google should open the corresponding product in the RIA.
Currently the best technique for making an RIA indexable by search engines is called progressive enhancement (or graceful degradation, depending on which way you see it). Basically you create a simple HTML version of the application using the same data as the application loads. This version should be dynamically generated by some kind of backend server technology. This HTML version can be indexed by Google, but each page also contains a check that determines if the visitor is capable of viewing the rich version, and if so replaces the HTML content with the Flash, Flex or Silverlight application, preferably in such a way that the application starts in a state where it shows the same data as the current page. "Replaces" can mean that it just embeds the application on top of the HTML content, or that it redirects the user to a page that embeds it. The former solution is preferable, because the latter can be considered cloaking.
One way of keeping the HTML and RIA versions of a shop synchronized is to decide on a URL scheme and make sure that RIA uses some kind of deep linking technique. If a visitor arrives to a specific item via a search engine, say /items/345 the corresponding pseudo-URL in the RIA should be the same, so that you can embed the RIA on top of the page and set that URL as a parameter to make the RIA display that same page as soon as it has loaded.
This summer, Google and Yahoo! announced that they would begin using a custom version of Flash Player to index Flash based applications by exploring them "in the same way that a person would". Now, two months later there is still no evidence that this is actually happening. Ryan Stweart had to cancel his Flex SEO competition because it became evident that no one could win. The problem seems to be that event though the technique may very well work (although I'm sceptical), the custom Flash Player needs some kind of network interface to be able to load any referenced resources, like XML data, other SWFs, etc., and this is currently not implemented by Google. This means that for an application that loads all it's data dynamically, like say, all that I can think of, Googlebot will not actually see anything relevant. Yahoo! ignores SWF based content altogether.
Oh, and it just so happens that I talk about Flex and SEO on the latest episode of the Flex show =)
There is a massive thread available here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/58926
But essentially, google already indexes .SWF files (you can test this out yourself by restricting search results to just .SWF files). It can search any text content within the SWF file.
However, if the text information in your site comes from a database / web server. Then it won't be able to access this information easily.
One example of getting this to work is using an XML file as your index page, then using an XSLT transform to render it using Flex. "Ted On Flex" has good information about this.
http://flex.org/consultants