SEO with Flash August 9, 2007

Iconara has a great post on SEO with Flash/Flex centric sites.

Sadly in many rush-rush design centric projects, web considerations are late in the development cycle, such as user experience during preloading (this has affected about 80% of the projects I've been apart of), and SEO. Tacking these features on after the fact is prohibitively expensive.
Part of the problem, is intrinsic to the high pressure, creative first, engineering second, testing/deployement only if time permits..of those who develop flash content, being first tier largely designers concerned with experience (pixels, movement, colors), they will embed fonts, or photoshop them to get the right Typography. so even if they could be straight pages easily indexable, and bots could open up the swf to see inside (which they can do, see them, after it's been ran through a dozen photoshop filters, collaged with a dozen , and spraypainted while it will look spectacular...you might as well be giving the bot a captchas.

Even engineering probably is more concerned about how to get it to work during development, than introducing another asset to load, and attaching links dynamically, as it's one more thing to go wrong and have to be tested. Though if considered early, a loadVars or an XML file for key value pairs, isn't particularly hard to load/parse, Danny has a simple utility to help for precisely http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=C45CA,

Google can and does index swfs, but it's rare that the links are actually relelvant. Frequentlly when building data driven Flash, if there are a 100 products and links to follow e.g. www.amazon.com/buyme?product.id=2, the link will be normalized into ' www.amazon.com/buyme?product.id' and '2'., with a string replace e.g.

function onClick (){
linkURL = SITE +"/" + SECTION +"?" + product.id;

}
When past projects have faced this, we used XML as the data and do client detection via a jsp/asp/etc +XLST and render HTML or Flash as appropriate.