Quick little poll for you guys (written late at night, not validated by my bosses, please be gentle...). There has been plenty of discussion on this list and elsewhere about deep linking and SEO for Flex apps. Various solutions are available currently for deep linking like URLKit or SWFAddress. However a robust solution for SEO is not available, primarily because the search engine vendors need to cooperate a little bit (the most popular suggestion these days is to return HTML instead of a SWF when you think it's a search engine viewing your page, however this is known as "cloaking" and the search engines frown upon it; think about how porn sites operate and you'll know why).
Deep linking on its own of course has benefits, better URL support in the address bar for bookmarking, copying into an IM or email, and even cleaner history management. But I would contend that most folks want deep linking so that pages can show up in a search engine, that while deep linking is nice, SEO is even more important. Q1: Do you think about deep linking primarily in the context of SEO, or do you often want deep linking for non-search-related tasks? We are currently investigating adding deep linking support into the Flex framework (similar perhaps to URLKit, but more integrated, design still TBD). However I also want to get your opinion as to whether you think we should be investing here at this time, knowing that we may not have an SEO solution at the same time. Note that as I said, SEO also requires search engine help, so this is not a straightforward tradeoff. Q2: Would you have us invest in deep linking before SEO, or is it of more use to you if they come out together? Are current deep-linking solutions sufficient for you at this time? Also note that this is a completely unscientific survey and that we reserve the right to do whatever we please regardless of how you respond :-P Thanks, Matt
