How about this one as an example: the Adobe Restaurant Finder sample
app, with the "Recent Reviews" page in particular. The app is here:
http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/restaurant/recentReviews.html
If you look at that app you can see user submitted reviews of
restaurants. For example, there's a review of Addis Red Sea and the
reviewer mentions E. Coli in the review. If anyone did a search for
"Addis Red Sea" and "E Coli" this page would never come up. The only
possible way to get the site to appear in search results would be to
publish an alternative HTML version of all the reviews.
And in fact a complete Google search for everything on
examples.adobe.com shows that you can't find anything useful:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:examples.adobe.com+&hl=en&lr=&filter=0
Yes, the Restaurant Finder app wrapper HTML page is indexed, but that's
useless.
Now, a Google search for "ecoli" on Yelp turns up tons of user-submitted
results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Ayelp.com+ecoli
The Yelp team would never give that up. They simply can't do Yelp in
Flex because they'd lose the search engine indexing. Now, I'm not saying
that this is a huge problem. All it means is that at the moment Flex is
not the answer for many websites. That's OK, Flex is still great at what
it does well. But if you want any of your dynamic content indexed by
search engines Flex is not the way to go. And it's not a matter of just
thinking about how to include keywords. Flex just simply isn't an
option, nor does it need to be, for websites like this. Use Flex for
what it does, but trying to make a website in Flex that needs to be
indexed by a search engine simply isn't an option at the moment.
And this "example" of the restaurant review stuff is a typical example
of tons of other types of websites that shouldn't be done in Flex.
Blogs, news sites, message boards, the list goes on and on. But if
you're doing some stuff that needs data visualization or you can do
without search engine indexing, then by all means use Flex. And I say
this as a HUGE fan of Flex. People just need to use it for what it's
good at.
Doug
John Dowdell wrote:
dougmccune wrote:
> While I know Adobe employees don't like to admit this, the answer is
> very simple: It is often impossible, and if not impossible then at
> least extremely difficult, to get your Flex content indexed by search
> engines. That's the straight answer. No more no less.
A particular concrete example might help bring this conversation back to
ground.
Work using Flex as the creation tool can certainly be found by search
engines. Identifying your reasonable target search terms is the first
step.
jd
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John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
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