Enhancing Flash SEO with Google Sitemaps for Video

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With deep linking I’ve always thought you would be fine creating a regular Google sitemap for your Flex/Flash application but I haven’t actually tried it or been able to test the SEOness of it. But today Google announced an extension of their sitemap protocol that will extend to videos and let web site owners specify where the videos on their site are and then associate metadata with them.

In looking at the spec, it seems like it would be fairly easy to extend to any Flash content. They have a video:content_loc tag which specifies an flv (flash video file) but then also have a video:player_loc that specifies a SWF file. If you can use that video:player_loc to specify a SWF and then use the title and description to get the Google-juice, that might be helpful for web developers using Flash.

SEO in rich Internet applications is still a big deal. I continue to get a lot of comments and thoughts on it. Brian Ussery, who sent me this tip, has been one of my favorite people to talk to about the subject. It’s something we think a lot about at Adobe and I always love to get feedback from web developers who are running into issues.

[tags]Flash, SEO, Google, Sitemaps, Video[/tags]

Related posts:

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  2. Video Interview with Tinic Uro Showing 1080p Video in Flash
  3. Google Finance – Beauty with Flash and AJAX
  4. Flash 8 Video Example
  5. New York Times using Flash Video
  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    I’ve got SEO working great for my flex based classifieds ads system. I have basic html versions of all the content (homepage, search results, category listings, ad details).

    Although browsers with flash see the flex app, everyone else (crawlers and browsers without flash) see the html version. The flex app has deep linking using anchor tags and the html version has short clean urls for search engines.

    It wasn’t a complex problem to solve and I think the fact that search engines don’t actually crawl the swf file is a non-issue. Creating a read only html lite version of your website is important for browsers without flash and allows you to optimize it for search engines rather than users.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    That seems like an ideal solution. Are search engines finding your stuff correctly?

  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    Yeah dude, check out http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.petsbc.com

    I still have more optimizations I’d like to make, but it’s at least working. Google was actually showing results the day after I implemented it.

    I also use this same setup to display Google AdSense ads in the flex app that are relevant to the content the user is currently viewing.

  • http://www.tareeinternet.com Carly

    Yes what Ryan is doing is the most ideal solution to heavy Flash based sites. Matt Cutts from Google has said this method is totally fine so long as the version presented to Google consists of the same content as the Flash version.

    In other words don’t have a Flash presentation on php coding and jam words relating to Javascript and everything else under the sun to get picked up on those keywords.

    Just do a simple Flash detect and redirect to the non-flash version. Also because your plain text version is in the search engines, a Flash detect and redirect to your Flash version otherwise everyone coming in from the Search Engines will only land on your plain text version.

    Ryan, have you click cache on your search results? Also get your SEO to do unique page Titles & Descriptions for every page.

  • Pingback: Indexer ses vidéos dans Google

  • http://www.marcliron.com Marc Liron

    …got fed up hand coding the XML files for my sites so created an app to make valide files for Google Video Sitemaps!

    http://www.videositemappro.com

    Its free to anyone who wants to use it.

    -Marc

  • http://www.jmihai.ro/blog/ J. Mihai

    This thing with flash and video files to be indexed by Search Engines was really a big subject on many webmaster/ webdevelopers forums. Its known since 2004 that search engines like google index the content of the flash, but I have seen many asking if the link in flash carries forward trust/importance, or how easy is and what are the advantages of using flash for a website.

    Many questions are still not answered, but I do hope I will have some tests related to this subject in the future. I will keep you up anyway.

    Kind regards,
    J.Mihai

  • Brian Ussery

    Thanks for the props Ryan!

    I’m always happy to help…
    : )