Deep-linking for Flex SEO

Posted on by

I’m planning on doing a Flex SEO contest update this week but I haven’t gotten around to it. Partly because so far I haven’t been happy with the results. A lot of people are putting a bunch of time into the contest (which is awesome) but Google doesn’t appear to be indexing things very well. But today I got a note from Justin-Everett Church that explained a couple of big questions I had. The first, and most important, was about deep linking.

Justin said the current way to get deep linking working is with site maps. By using site maps, you can have the search engine spider the content from where it initializes. I don’t know all that much about site maps, so I’m not sure how well this would work or where a good demo would be, but if you’re using site maps, please let me know. I’d love to hear how they affect your Flex deep-linking.

Related posts:

  1. Announcing the Flex SEO Contest
  2. Bringing Flex and Flash Even Closer to the Web
  3. Yahoo! Maps for ActionScript 3
  4. Yahoo! Gets More Flash, CFPodcast Talks Flex and FlexPodcast.com?
  5. Flex Derbying With the Rest of the World
  • http://cyrilhanquez.com Cyril Hanquez

    Hi Ryan,

    I will have a look at site maps, but for me at the moment the Flash SEO is a complete failure : It seems that it worked when Google launched it, but now bots are ignoring our Flex apps. I’m not very confident about our testing when I read from the Google blog post :

    1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
    2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
    3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

    Wait & See…:-)

  • http://fleximagically.com polyGeek

    I’ve broken down and stopped using the SWFObject for embedding just to see if the Google-bot can read my site. Now I’m just using the good/old tags. The Google-bot seems to be passing by my site about once every two days. Lets hope this helps.

  • http://www.design-ex.com.au Andy

    I am about to get a new site built and was considering a flex e-comerce site but I am concern that flex will not give great SEO results. Can you give me any info on this