Web Analytics Without Flash
Back in April, Yahoo acquired IndexTools, a provider of analytics software based in Hungary. Last week, that service has re-emerged as Yahoo Web Analytics, and is being offered as a limited beta to customers of Yahoo Small Business. Additionally, the tool will also be made available to select Yahoo advertisers.
Web Analytics is not something new, I’m sure most of bloggers are using Google Analytics to get insight on how their blogs are perceived online. Especially for people in the e-commerce space, web analytics becomes the essential tool to understand their customers and what their customers want.
How about Flash analytics?
Am I asking too much before we haven’t even got Flash indexing (Flash SEO) sorted out yet? I can see there are three possibilities:
- A Flash based site (or a Flex application) is not geared for the use that needs web analytics type capability. If needed, go with HTML.
- This is a huge opportunity of innovation for creative Flash/Flex developers.
- Who cares.
How do you think?
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Hi Charles,
I care :). I actually wonder whether generating HTML pages for Google that map one-on-one (from a context point of view) with the ‘pages’ in a Flex application would be acceptable to Google. Because in that case it’s rather easy to have full blown SEO for Flash & Flex applications. I would love to get some feedback from someone at Google in this regard.
Tom
Hi,
Just for note it’s already possible to create deep linking flash websites, just check for SWFAddress, it has build in Google Analytics support, and also with some php code, you can generate those deep links into the embedding html page dynamically, so search engines are able to index it.
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/
Also you can integrate flash with any other analytics tool (like indextools) just you had to use javascript communication.
Best Regards,
Andrew Csizmadia
the problem with SWFAddress (or the built in deep linking support in Flex) is that it works by setting the part after ‘#’ in the url. The problem is that this part isn’t taken into account by Google. There doesn’t seem to be a way to change the part before ‘#’. There are however other solutions to the problem but SWFAddress isn’t going to cut it.
Ok, i got your point. And it’s really true: “Googlebot ignores #anchors in URLs”.
But i think it’s a step forward and worth to mention. And you can use cloaking techniques and mod_rewrite. So if you look at the SEO example of SWFAddress, it doesn’t contain anchor based links in the code (.htaccess sample is included in the source package of the example).