Comments on: Should SWF need to be searchable?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:53:47 +0000

I agree with the gist of Abdul’s article – it isn’t necessary for SE’s to index SWFs. Most developers understand the principle of keeping content and presentation separate and so a SWF shouldn’t have any content in it to index in the first place – the content should be dynamic. If you really want to optimise a web page for a SE, just put your SEO HTML data in the alternative content div tag. A SE can read this without any problems at all!
Matt

By: Abdul Qabiz

Abdul Qabiz — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:39:28 +0000

@Josh: Thanks for the link to Ted’s directory app, I think, that’s what I also meant in my post.
-abdul

By: Gabriel mariani

Gabriel mariani — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:08:27 +0000

I think for SWFs to be SEO friendly there should be an agreed upon API that search engines would use to query the SWF for content that they want indexed. That way it is up to the developer to provide the search engine with said information. I think that’s true for HTML developers as well. Except they have meta tags, keywords, etc. Flash should have it’s equivalent.

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:03:58 +0000

To me, a SWF itself shouldn’t be crawled by search engines. The content the SWF displays should be what’s relevant, and it’s up to developer to ensure that content can be seen by search engines. It’s like asking if CSS and JavaScript should be crawled.
For an excellent example of a Flash application whose data is viewable by search engines without going into the SWF, people should check out Ted Patrick’s Flex Directory at http://directory.onflex.org/