How Search Engines Index Flash Sites
SEO is always on the minds of flash site designers. How well or unwell are flash sites indexed by search engines? How at all?
Google was the first engine to index .PDFs, .DOCs, other dynamic content, and also flash, through its in-house methods. Later, FAST became the first engine to index flash sites using the Flash Search Engine SDK. Today, all major search engines use the SDK along with their own processing to index flash sites.
The Search Engine SDK includes an application called ’swf2html’. It extracts text and links from a .SWF, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML. The application works for .SWFs that may have been created for Flash Player versions as old as 3.
Watch this space for SEO techniques specific to flash sites.
Tidbit: Atomz and PicoSearch are custom search engines that parse through a .SWF and catalogue information based on it.
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Does the swf2html application work with swf’s created in Flex?
I’ve read that it works for flex as well, but I have also read that indexing flex sites is tougher than indexing flash sites. I’ll let you know if I find anything concrete.
Let us hope that one of the commentators help us out.
I would definetly be keeping an eye out for SEO flash/flex sites.
Joseph, we are very soon starting a series on SEO for flash sites, trying to consolidate everything we can find out. Hope it’ll be helpful.