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. :-)

AJAX vs Flash, an SEO perspective

There is still a perception out there by some web developers that Flash isn’t a serious tool for creating dynamic websites.

For years the main knock against Flash is that it isn’t search engine friendly. That’s true. It can be overcome to a degree but it is a limitation. That limitation has lead a large crowd of web developers to pass over Flash as a possible option for their websites.

But when Web 2.0/AJAX came along many of these developers jumped all over it. Which is great. Utilizing AJAX is a huge improvement to the functionality of many web sites out there. I’ve seen some incredible work done. What gets me is that AJAX is just as limited in SEO terms as Flash is. But, AJAX isn’t Flash so it’s okay.

So if you’re going to build a site that is going to rest on dynamic data there is no reason to ignore Flash. Not so say that Flash will be the best option for every site. One good reason to use AJAX is that you might have a house full of HTML/CSS/Javascript experts on hand but no one who is solid in Flash. Well, that pretty much makes your decision for you. But if you’re looking to have a site built and you don’t come with any baggage then Flash pretty much stands out. There are a growing number of developers out there who can leverage the power of Flash and the Flash player continues to grow more and more powerful with more features and the adoption rate is so fast that it even astounds the guys at Macro’dobe.

Here’s a pretty good article about Flash and Google.

How to Design Flash Pages for Google

This is where I found out about the Flash SDK.

If you are at all concerned about how search engines might index your Flash site/files then you must get the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK. It’s a comand line utility so warm up that DOS prompt but it isn’t too hard to use. Best of all you’ll be able to look at your site/files through the eyes of a search engine spider.

I discovered that my SciFi test site returns a big fat zero to a spider. The reason is that all the data in the site is loaded via XML files. That really sucks. It means that – at least for now – dynmamic data doesn’t count. So not only is it hard as hell to make a Flash website that is spider friendly now we need to find a work-around for dynamic data. That really kind of sucks.

The Flash platform has come a long way. But there is one big hurdle left: better integration with search engines. That’s something that Flash and AJAX both have with.

I created a test site to see how a spider might index a Flash based website. There isn’t much to on the site. Just some reviews of SciFi movies and such. But the site is bookmarkable. So far it hasn’t been crawled or if it has it doesn’t return anything at Google. When I do a site search it doesn’t bring back any results.

If you check it out you can see that it is about as simple as any Flash site could be. Everything is text, including the links. No MovieClips to confuse things. So I’d consider this a best case scenario for indexing – if it would just get crawled.

If you feel like burying a link on your site to the SciFi.VectorSpaceStudios.com site then please do so. Maybe getting a few more links out there to it would help.

Of course anything that I discover I’ll report here. My dream is that it will get indexed by Google and I’ll be able to click a link there that will take me into the site to the content that I searched for. If that happens I’ll make the FLA for the site available so others can follow suit. I’d love to see people out there developing sites in Flash that are indexed and bookmarkable. That would help Flash clear it’s last major hurdle – until we find something else. :-)