Adobe: Yes google will index your Flex app. It reads the text in the file and keywords in the html page (basically etc). Flex is SEO friendly.
Doug: Sure, google will show your link to your site for "resturant review" but it does not index the dynamic data in that site. So if someone is searching for "Casa Bonita" (sings melody) and not "resturant review" the site will not be listed because google does not know that "resturant review.com" contains information about "Casa Bonita". At least not without unnatural restructuring of the application and application wrapper. Me: I do not know if search engines can find and index this information. A concrete example that a Flex app with dynamic data is being index would suffice that it is not an issue. If it is an issue, referring specifically about dynamic data, not static, then a distinction should be made to clarify this conversation. Flex = SEO friendly Dynamic data in Flex = Impossible without modifications(?) Right? So putting everything else aside... we could say that some people want more support in this area or at least a better answer (or recommend solution) to this specific issue. /end of message /start of suggested solution We all know how a search engine works. It finds a site, indexes the content on the home page and then crawls through the rest of it *by following links*. Each page it finds it indexes the content on those pages. So lets say we have a comic book forum created in flex. Our flex app has 3 main states, forum index, forum posts (newest ten shown) and forum message thread. In an HTML site the search engine would follow the each forum link and then read in the forum posts page and follow those links and read in each message thread. Right now Flex apps have no links to follow because they do not deal with pages they deal with states. So what if on each state we wrote out html anchors to the browser dynamically? Using something like URLKit you can go to different states in your Flex app by url. So in your comic book forum your page loads, the flex app writes links to the page after content is received from the server. Google comes along finds page, finds the content, indexes it, finds the links and recursively goes through the site. It is unknown how google indexes so this may not be possible of course but I'm saying, "if we build it they will come - and adopt it or rewrite it." -er, this also works, "if we want it they will build it". dorkie cant sleep dork from dorktown I think we can come up with a solution. the problem you are saying is how to index dynamic data. On 12/15/06, Doug McCune <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
OK, right, we were talking about two different things. Sorry if this has caused confusion. I was talking about dynamic data being indexable by search engines. You were talking about search engine optimization for static content (sorry again if I'm still misunderstanding). I guess I never think about search engine optimization in terms other than how to get your dynamic content indexed by search engines. If I have a restaurant review website I want google to index every review that my users write. I don't know what you call this is if doesn't count as "search engine optimization," but I guess that's not what the term means. If I run a restaurant review website I don't want to show up for someone searching "restaurant reviews". I want to show up for someone searching "El Farolito burritos". And there's no way I can optimize static content with restaurant names or with what users are going to write. But I guess that's not SEO, my bad. John Dowdell wrote: I'm out of this conversation, sorry... if I say "start with the search terms you're trying to be found on" and don't get acknowledgment, I'll just bow out now. (That restaurant sample applet, I have no idea if it's data-fed text or internal text, and don't see mentions of E Coli myself, and that's not the common type of things people are looking for with search engine optimization. Undefined terms make the convo go 'round.) Recap: > Work in Adobe Flex produces SWF files. Text within SWF files can be > found and used by the search engines (contrary to widespread myth). Example: > http://www.google.com/search?q=%22contrary+evidence%22+filetype%3Aswf > > If your content includes material fed in via database, then the search > engine would not usually see that you use those words. > > As with all SEO tasks, you'd first figure what search terms you have a > chance to compete on (eg, you will never appear on the first page of > results for search terms like "buy flowers online"). Then set up your > HTML hosting page with TITLE, URL, metadata and reinforcement of the > targeted text terms. Then make sure you get plenty of inbound links from > authoritative sources, preferably with your targeted search terms as > anchor text. jd -- John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/ Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks.
