Dead Ink Vinyl

It seems to me that thinking about the problem as “indexing Flash” is to approach the matter backward. We want the data to be indexed—the presentation is irrelevant. Take this blog as an example. It’s database-driven and generates documents with my content—these words you’re reading now—wrapped inside of some HTML garnish to make the reading experience pleasant. If you’re reading this in a feed reader, then the content is wrapped in Atom or RSS garnish. Do I care what garnish surrounds my content? Not particularly.

The same principle holds true for other Web applications, whether the garnish is Ajax, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, or—like this blog—good old fashioned dynamically generated HTML. It is the data that must be indexed, the presentation around that data is (conceptually) irrelevant for SEO purposes. I think the matter may be confused because for so long the data and the presentation were bundled together in HTML (like this blog). Now with Ajax and Flash/Flex, we are back to separating the user interface from the data. However, when the data isn’t part of the user interface document sent by the server, it’s harder for search engines to access and index.

So what’s the solution? Expose the data for indexing and detect when incoming links should launch the Flash/Flex app instead of responding with the raw information. Naturally, the Flash/Flex app would be launched to deep-linked directly to the relevant content. If you’re not sure how to make the data indexable, I’ll tell you that I take my guidance from RESTful Web Services. The magic in this solution is detecting when an incoming link should launch a deep-linked Flex application and when it should render the raw data. For the moment, I’ll punt on detailing an implementation—consider it to be an exercise for the reader.

An exercise for the reader that can lead to rich rewards! Ryan Stewart has announced the Flex SEO Contest to encourage the community to establish best practices for Flash/Flex indexing. The rules are straightforward and the top prize is CS4 Master Collection. I like the challenge and may try my hand creating an entry that meets the contest criteria just for the experience of it.