Hi Eric, Thanks for pointing us to the link. It's always good to see new research popping up.
Re: which means that Googlebot now skips any (X)HTML content inside the SWFObject divs and instead indexes the Flash. Incorrect, it doesn't skip the HTML content. It indexes both your HTML and Flash content, and makes a decision which content it will show to a certain visitor as a search result. The main question is: which are the variables in this decision process? Does it take the visibility of content into account? E.g. if you only show a Flash video with no textual content Googlebot will probably index nothing, however if you provide descriptive alternative content will it show these results instead? Also does the type of user agent that makes a search request influence the process? E.g. Google would ideally only like to show search results based on what someone with particular a user agent can see, so a text browser should render different results than Firefox with Flash installed, and in case of dynamic publishing with JavaScript enabled. But you can already see the complexity here, how does Google know that you have the required version of Flash Player installed or JavaScript enabled? And what about the difference between static and dynamic publishing? Brian Ussery gives some good new insight in how Google deals with web content today, however his first conclusion is certainly not that conclusive at all. There is a lot more research that needs to be done to describe Google's internal logic. And I agree with you, that Google indexes Flash content is a great first next step, however I expect many more to follow. Search engines are far more optimized to crawl HTML content, so in certain ways this is a case of two steps forward, one step back. Also, HTML has more descriptive qualities than Flash, and it also contains hierarchy and semantics, so it will be interesting to see how Flash vs HTML indexing will evolve into the future. But in favor of Google don't forget that the meat of the Flash content on the Web today does not use any fallback content at all, even not for people without the proper technology support, so at least Google will now index those websites. That brings me to the next point. SEO is a very dynamic topic. Especially when it comes to the web authoring part of SEO, I personally have the opinion that SEO guidelines should NEVER conflict with good web authoring practices. So when at moment X search engine Y's results can be pimped by using H1 elements in a web page only (which is obviously a bad web authoring practice), you should never apply these guidelines, because they are likely not to do a website any good in the near or long future. > My biggest worry is this: Almost all the Flash sites I build are > dynamically-driven by necessity. This makes the content in them really > difficult for Googlebot to index (Googlebot reads external data as > separate pages, has trouble following links, and so on). Whereas > before I could use SWFObject to deliver a (X)HTML version of the > content to Googlebot (for SEO) and Flash content to users with Flash > (for visual and user-impact), it seems I can't do that anymore. Please keep in mind that SWFObject is a best practice web authoring technique for embedding SWF content and NOT an SEO optimization tool. The main purpose for using alternative content is to display descriptive content to people or software with insufficient technology support. And yes, this also enables you to create search engine- friendly content, however maybe to a different target audience than you had in mind. > So based on all this, I've got two questions: > 1) Is there a way in SWFObject to FORCE an (X)HTML output if SWFObject > detects the visitor is a robot? You should never abuse SWFObject for this purpose. Google respects mechanisms like robots.txt, so maybe you could use that for your purpose. > 2) What are other tactics people are using in order to optimize > dynamically-driven Flash sites for Google? Web authoring part is only a small part of SEO, really. The content you supply, linkage from and to that content, and many more factors (e.g. update intervals, content and linkage built over time) eventually will determine how well a website ranks. For the web authoring part I can only advise to use good web authoring practices, don't rely on tricks, follow Google's web authoring guidelines and use your common sense. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SWFObject" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/swfobject?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
