Taking Flex SEO for a test drive
Unless you’ve been hiding under a MSN search box you’ve heard the news that Adobe has worked with Google and Yahoo to make SWF files truly indexable by search engine spiders.
I’ve put together a quick Flex application this morning to take this new feature for a test drive. It’s just a TabNavigator displaying a few tabs of content about Greek gods. My goal isn’t to become the number one result for zeus. I just want to see the content get indexed and see what the search results look like.
If you would like to help out with this little experiment then try linking to the application so that it might get crawled sooner. Wouldn’t it be cool if this little experiment ended up being on Google’s first page for “greek gods zeus”? I’ll do a site-search every few days to see when it gets indexed and report back in another post when it does.
I pulled the content off of the Wikipedia.org site and dropped it into a database here at polyGeek.com. Then I used AMFPHP to grab the data and create as many tabs in the TabNavigator as there are results. And I added toolTips to the images if you mouse over them.
The nice thing about the TabNavigator is that the BrowserManager is automatically engaged. And I wrote 3 lines of code to enable the deepLinking in the app so you can land directly on a specific tab depending on the URL. And as always, mi coda, su coda.
In the code I’ve added the SQL, images, and my GoRemote.mxml to help you recreate this if you want. You’ll just need to get AMFPHP going yourself and add my AMFdata.php file to the ../services/amfphp/ folder. I might cover all the more in depth in a later post, someday.
Addendum: I just read the blog post at Google and it mentions that
Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file…
I’m using the default Javascript/HTML code that FlexBuilder creates. So I’ll see if it gets indexed. And if you’re wondering why I use the default FB code it’s because I’m too lazy to take the additional step of using SWFobject, most of the time. :-)
brett
