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FlashApe » Designing Flash Pages for Google

 Designing Flash Pages for Google

  • March 11th, 2006
  • 11:03 am

infomit.com has an article up about designing pages for google, which talks about the Flash Search Engine SDK. One of the cool things about that I didn’t know was that not only will it index the text on stage in a flash movie, but it will also index the text inside movieclips that are placed on stage with attachMovie().

If all your text is going to be included in the flash move at author time, then that is fine. However if youa re pulling dynamic data into the flash movie, then this is pretty ineffective. For those cases, I usually detect for a search engine bot, and if one is found then I dump the text contents of the database (relevent to the page that google is trying to find, if I have deep links set up on my site), with basic text formatting, rather than serve up the swf file. If it’s a regular browser, it gets the swf file.

5 People had this to say...

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  • Geoff
  • March 11th, 2006
  • 3:51 pm

I’m not a fan of detecting Google/search bots and serving different content. They usually frown on this type of thing (as I’m sure you heard about BMW germany getting black listed from Google because they were doing just that).

It’s better to use something like FlashObject to embed your Flash movies, and include the alternate content for that page ‘under’ the flash movie, so the user never sees it, but google will not trigger the javascript so it will index all the alternate content.

Another bonus to this method is that you can style your alternate content, so if the user doesn’t have Flash, they can still access all the info.

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  • rich
  • March 11th, 2006
  • 4:02 pm

yeah, you’re right I should have mentioned FlashObject too, that is another good method.

However, Google doesn’t frown on that sort of thing. What they frown in is detecting for the google bot and serving up different content to their bot than what a normal browser user would see…for instance, if a porn site is going to detect for a bot and serve up some harmless content about puppies when it finds the googlebot, that’s no good. In my case, the content would be the same, just formatted differently. I used to have a link on my blog (before I lost my entire blog db) that had a link to official word from google that that is the preferred way of getting flash content visible to the search engine. If i can find it i will repost it.

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  • cosmin
  • March 12th, 2006
  • 11:16 am

In one project I recently did I used the xhtml pages to feed the flash template. I had to resort to CDATA tags in order to preserve some formatting. Do you think that this is a negative aspect from google pow?

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  • rich
  • March 12th, 2006
  • 12:28 pm

i dont think so…it seems to me that google is pretty smart when it comes to trying to figure out when your really trying to cheat the system.

there’s more about using xhtml/xml with flash here:
http://www.jessewarden.com/archives/2005/04/how_to_have_goo.html

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  • rich
  • March 12th, 2006
  • 12:32 pm

oh, and that last link has the part about word from google about serving up the html instead of flash.

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