I just wanted to chime in with some ideas, and to suggest that Claus's answer is the right one.
First, this is a problem of standards. Adobe with Flex and Flash, try to keep things as open ended as possible, and so you can build your Flex/Flash apps in many ways to draw the data from some data source (SOAP/XML-RPC/Remoting from Flash, or using AJAX with a bridge connector, etc.). I think that's great and don't necessarily think Adobe needs to fix the problem, since I don't think it's Adobe's problem - I like the flexibility. This is a problem for Google and others, to fix, or perhaps one that there is already a solution for. What these search engines index is the content contained within structured _documents_, not web apps. Most current server side web apps will generate and serve structured documents to the web browser - and to the indexing spiders, but what Google and others are indexing is not the actual web app itself or it's business logic. They are indexing only the documents returned over http in (x)html format (or pdf, or other document formats). The problem with Flex/Flash/AJAX/Expression Blend apps, is that they are not documents, they are applications. How would Google or anyone else index something like Microsoft Word, or Adobe Photoshop. This is the appropriate way to look at these client side web apps, in my opinion. So I think the appropriate question to ask, is how can I, as an application/content provider, take advantage of Google, and others' indexing services. To me the answer is as Claus suggests - to build an alternative, server side web app, that serves the documents to spiders and bots (BTW, this can be produced before or after the UI - it's up to the developer ;-) ). The interesting question, and the place that needs focus, is what is the right way to direct traffic from those search pages back into the web app. I think the easiest way to do that would be with a small snippet of JavaScript that would detect for Flash Player (or whatever the app requires) then location.replace you into the appropriate location within the application (which would need deep linking support, and there many ways to do that now). What's needed now is a concrete example to follow, or a set of patterns or standards, or whatever, that will ease the development of this second view of your app's content. It would be nice if Google and Adobe (and whoever else) could get together and figure out what these standards/patterns should look like, but there's no reason the development community can't get this figured out. :-) Kevin N. Claus Wahlers wrote: >> AND, re: the potential problem that Google punishes websites which in >> whatever way tweak the display of the indexed data (for example by >> adding a Flex UI layer on top), it would be TREMENDOUSLY helpful if >> Adobe would approach Google and once and for all clarifies what's >> allowed and what's not. If that's ever possible, that is. >> > > PLUS.. ;) I'd be interested in how Ajax applications handle SEO, as they > likely face the same, or similar problems. > > Cheers, > Claus. > >
