Monthly Archives: June 2008

How to Get Your Flash Site at the Top of Google

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Update: This post from Google provides a lot of good info.

I’m not sure I made this clear in my previous post so I’m going to try here. A lot of people including Brooks Andrus, Peter Elst, are all either confused or skeptical of what the SEO announcement really means for Flash/Flex applications.

First off, yes, Google has always been able to index Flash content…sort of. They could scrape some text by introspecting the SWF file and pull some meaningful data from it. But that’s about it. This new player behaves much more like a human player. It allows Google’s spiders to click on links, move through states of an application, detect when the URLs change, and everything else a “normal” Flash Player can do. So instead of grabbing text, it’s grabbing text and context for the application. In theory, Google will know that clicking on a button changes the URL or loads a new state and then loads some new text. Before we never had that. There was no context for what Google was seeing because the spiders didn’t understand what was going on inside of the Flash movie to make the state changes happen.

So how do you get your Flash site to the top of Google? No one knows. That’s the same thing as asking how you get your HTML site to the top of Google. No one knows. There are tricks and theories, but Google changes the algorithm and evolves it’s index. The point is that now Flash/Flex applications will have the same kind of context that Ajax applications do according to Google. So we’re subject to the same rules and every Flash and Flex developer should start figuring out how Google treats Flash content. That’s not something they’re going to tell Adobe.

If you’ve got questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to get it answered. But unfortunately we’re in the territory of Google’s search algorithm and there are what, 5 people on earth that know that?

Finally, Flash Becomes Truly Searchable

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Update 2: Google posts about the new stuff and sheds some light on what will and won’t be indexed. (Props to Brian for the link)

Update: I did a Seesmic post below. It’s lame but I figured it was worth a shot.

It’s easy to get caught up in every new announcement when you’re an evangelist and I’ve definitely been overly excited a few times when I probably shouldn’t have but tonight is a really, really important milestone for anyone who is building Flash/Flex applications. One of the biggest pains/pressure points/disadvantages to using Flash is going to be minimized. We’re announcing today that we are working with Yahoo and Google to more accurately index SWF content.

So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.

The best part? You don’t have to do anything. Any SWF you already have out there will be indexed by this new player. Of course it won’t automatically be as good as HTML. Google won’t automatically deep-link your content or pull out unique URLs. So overnight I’m not sure a lot will change. But the most important part of this announcement to me is the fact that HTML and Flash can be on the same general footing when it comes to search engine optimization.

Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files.

SEO is big, big business. There are entire firms dedicated to it and a TON of money changes hands. Now Flash developers can get in on it and start figuring out how to optimize their SWFs to meet Google’s requirements. That’s pretty damn cool and it could result in a lot of money for the folks that figure it out first.

More links

Using LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 Inside of ColdFusion 8

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By default, ColdFusion 8 comes with LCDS 2.5. But there’s a lot of new, good stuff in LCDS 2.6 that might be good to take advantage of if you’re doing data services work in ColdFusion. There are some instructions on Labs, but I just tried them tonight, and I think they’re terrible. Luckily, Joshua Rodgers has a great step-by-step walkthrough for getting LCDS 2.6 up and running inside your ColdFusion 8 server.

I just wanted to make sure people saw Joshua’s instructions and didn’t waste time like I did decoding the official version.

Mark your Calendars for July 11th: Adobe RedMonk SAP Enterprisey Nanoconference

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Are you interested in how RIAs fit into the enterprise? Are you going to be in London July 11th? If so, then you should swing by Adobe’s offices in Regent’s Park because James Ward and James Governor of RedMonk fame are holding a “Nanoconference” around RIAs in the enterprise. It sounds like it’ll be a lot of talking about Flex and SAP but also about general RIA and UI topics in the UK. I looks like it’ll have a Javay feel to it, so if you’re a Java developer you should be right at home and can ask some good questions.

I hope they record it.

Another Good List of the “Best” AIR Apps

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Kevin Nunez posted about some of the “Best” AIR applications he’s come across. It’s a pretty good list that’s divided into a number of different categories but he doesn’t actually link to any of the applications which I think is crazy. The only reason I mention it is because I hadn’t seen a lot of these apps yet. If any of them sound interesting, leave a comment telling Kevin to link them and then track them down yourself.

Use Flex to Trick out your MySpace Page

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I don’t spend a lot of time on MySpace anymore but I noticed Ciara was messing with her profile and there was a little WYSIWYG editor over on the left hand side. Since I spend a lot of time with Flex applications it was pretty easy to see that they were using Flex for their new profile editor and James Ward’s Is it Flex confirmed it.

The application is kind of boring. I mean compared to the trainwreck that most of MySpace seems to be it’s a welcome improvement but it doesn’t really blend with the rest of the MySpace world. I’m bummed they didn’t do any theming or customization (Thermo would be a good fit here, I think). They used basic components and it doesn’t seem to flow with the profile you’re editing. But it does make it really, really easy to edit your profile and the stock themes they come with are a big help. It’s great to see MySpace using Flex.

Note: I’m not sure how long this has been around. So this may not be news. It’s hard to search for anything about a MySpace theme editor because of all the other sites out there that offer the same thing.

Adobe Evangelism – Where Climbing an Active Volcano Happens

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My mid-year resolution is to do more video and incorporate it into my job. Sometimes it’ll be interviews of people at conferences (I’ve got one with Alan Lewis from eBay coming later this week) and other times it will be random bits of video that only loosely apply to my job but are meant to be Adobe enough for this blog. This is one of the latter cases. Funny? Not really. Interesting? Maybe…you do get to look down into a volcano. Cheesy? Hopefully. So fair warning, you may want 56 seconds of your life back.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

Oddly enough, I actually did meet a couple of .NET developers. There was a scout troop climbing the mountain with us and they overheard me talking to my friend about what I was planning to do for the video and asked me about it. They were mostly server-side developers and they wouldn’t go on film….I think they thought I was a little strange (they may feared for the children :) )….but I did give them my business card. So despite the joke video I actually got to do some evangelizing on the mountain…sort of.

The slogan comes from the NBA and Bill Simmons who uses it as a joke and got me thinking about it.

The Most Important Talk from the AIR Tour – Ethan Malasky

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Mike Chambers posted what I think is the absolute most important talk from the on AIR Tour. It’s Ethan Malasky’s presentation on Developing Secure AIR Applications. Security is one of the things that gets talked a lot about with regards to AIR and the team spent a huge, huge amount of time thinking about the security model. Ethan shows off a bunch of examples and talks a bit about the HTML Security model. He also demos what kinds of things might have been possible if we hadn’t taken the steps we did with HTML in AIR. Great presentation.

Ethan also posted the slides on his blog so I put them into Share and you can grab them here:

The Best RIA Resource Yet

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Matthias sent a note about RIA Alltop and I think it’s the best collection of RIA blogs/information that I’ve seen. Alltop is a “headline aggregator” it basically has a collection of blogs on a subject and then lists the most recent posts for those blogs. The RIA section covers everything from Flash, Flex, Silverlight, JavaScript – pretty much any RIA language that you’re interested in. It’s by far the most diverse collection and I think it’s one of the best ways to get a quick snapshot from a variety of different sources. This is going to become the second link I click in the morning after Techmeme.