I recently got a question in my e-mail on how to do seo with flash. Maybe something with xml? Would that be indexed better? And, won’t it be seen as spam?

Well, this guy is definately thinking in the right direction, xml is the way to go.

Use RSS for indexing

Instead of using just ‘a’ xml file for showing the content to the spider why not use the rss standard. RSS is a formiliar content type for spiders, which they index, and it has a direct relevance to the page it is on. You can do this in two different ways.

One RSS for the entire site

This works well with small sites, as all contents can be placed in that one file. For bigger sites however you would get so many items in one RSS that important content might be skipped. (Text more to the bottom of a page is deemed less important than content at the top of the code.)

An RSS for every page

Eventhough your flash site or application exsist in only one swf, it is still possible to link to a part of it directly. So, index.php?type=guestbook points to your guestbook in the swf. And index.php?type=contact points to the contact form. And on all of these ‘pages’ you can point to a different RSS showing the content for that specific page. Which is also great for the usability, you don’t just point to the swf leaving people to look for what they need by themselves, but give a direct link to the content.

It does have some downsides however. Url’s like index.php?type= aren’t exactly search engine friendly. And you have a risk of being penitalized for duplicate content. The first one is easily solved. Just use rewrite rules in your .htaccess or in the httpd.conf if you have access to that.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) ^index.php?type=$1

The second problem isn’t as easily solved because you do in fact have duplicate content. Again, usability offers the answer here. Show the .swf and the normal content below that. Then use javascript to hide the normal content. This way people that do not have the flashplayer (text browser and such) will still have normal content. And with javascript you can also detect wether there is in fact a flash plugin and hide either the flash or the text depending on that. This however means extra work.

Sitemap.xml

So, how does the search engine know which pages to visit for that rss then? You can use the sitemap.xml from google to make it index every page. It’s still in beta however. Other than that, provide a html sitemap which links to your normal pages.

Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK

There is good news however. Macromedia/adobe has their own flash search engine, especially for search engine to use in their own products. With this they will be able to search through flash sites to get to the content. However, no major search engines use this yet to my knowledge. As they would have to trust in the product of Macromedia to get to all content correctly, instead of making their own stuff which they can alter easily to catch all seo tricks.

Conclusion

There is a lot that can be done to make a flash site more search engine friendly. However, the best advice is still, to not use flash for content. This may change in the future.

I found a good tutorial that explains step by step how to make a flash site more search engine friendly.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 2:29 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Flash, Usability, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.