Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog
6 different web designers have asked me about making Flash SEO friendly in the last month, so I’ll post some tips here. Most SEOs would agree that Flash is not really SEO friendly(yet). This is because all the content(text) is inside the flash movie and the spiders can’t read it or at least usually choose not to index that content. Supposedly SEs can index some content embedded in Flash but I have not seen any sites banking on this theory successfully. There is a pretty good alternative(I hate to use the word trick) that has been going around the SEO circles for while. This solution is to use the SWFObject script. This script allows for a div section named “flashcontent”. Anything placed inside this div will not be shown to the user but your Flash movie will show up as usual. The idea is to place plain text content and/or links inside this div as spider food.
An added bonus of using this script is it gets rid of the “white lines” shown around a Flash movie before the “control” is activated in IE by clicking on the Flash object.
In other SEO friendly Flash related news, another designer email me a link to fCMSPro which claims to be an SEO friendly Flash based content management system(CMS). I took a look at their product and while it has made some advances in terms of more SEO friendly flash, it also has some serious drawbacks(IMHO). The way it works I assume is by passing in a variable to the flash script to tell it which content to load. I assume it gets the various URLs with the variables attached indexed by creating a sitemap somewhere linking to each one. Certainly if you had to use a Flash CMS for some reason(that I can’t think of), you’d probably want to use this one. Take that lightly because I have never even seen another Flash based CMS out there.
Have Fun Flashing
4 responses so far ↓
Igor // Jan 18th 2007 at 2:52 am
Hello,
fCMSPro (http://fcmspro.com) is using SWFObject and displays html content in case that appropriate flash player is not detected. You can see that by disabling javascript in your browser (that way flash will not be detected and html content will be displayed) or by adding ’skipflash=true’ to the url (http://fcmspro.com/index.php?skipflash=true) By enabling javascript again on certain page will display exactly the same content inside flash.
Please try demo by going to administration mode at the same website. There are some unique features that make Flash based CMS worthwile.
Also, please explain “some serious drawbacks” better.
Google cache of the same website: http://google.com/search?q=site%3Afcmspro.com
Thanks.
mike // Jan 18th 2007 at 8:23 am
Hi Igor,
I didn’t realize it was using SWFObject. I would have said the drawback was the lack of ability to fully utilize a solid internal linking structure. I suppose since you are using SWFObject you could embed “links” into the flashcontent div and acheive close to the same affect. Thanks for commenting
mike // Jan 18th 2007 at 8:29 am
Igor,
I did think of another drawback. It is not serious but it is time consuming. If the whole site was written in flash cms and you are making changes suchs as adding pages, removing pages, etc, you now have to change the flash and the HTML versions. So basically you have more work to do and more things to test when a change needs to occur. Again not the end of the world but something that needs to be considered. Seems easier to me to use an HTML based CMS in the first place and not worry about it. You can still use Flash throughout that HTML site using the SWFObject if need be.
Igor // Jan 19th 2007 at 3:12 am
Mike,
If you need to change design yes you will need change swf. But all of the content can be added easily on-site (is there any other CMS more intuitive then fCMSPro?)
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