Flash, indexing and rich applications
There has been a lot of buzz about Google's improved flash indexing. While this initiative may be helpful for extracting and locating text and media content in SWF files, it probably won't help much with indexing structure. There's no real standard for 'deep linking' into Flash applications. Also, most OpenLaszlo applications they won't get indexed by Google because they're embedded with JavaScript.
So what's a developer to to do? In a nutshell, generate simple HTML for each item in the application which can be crawled by Google and other search engines. Each page uses Javascript to replace the HTML content with an application that starts up in the appropriate state. You can see a live example here from the Laszlo in Action book.
In this example, the items are products in an online store. Each product gets its own URL/HTML page, linked to from index pages or search results. Each product page embeds an application that is passed the product ID so the application comes up in the right context. Deep linking and history still work as users browse products, courtesy of the OpenLaszlo embedding and history system. Try browsing through a few different products - notice your browsing history is preserved - the back and forward buttons work just as they should. Try turning off JavaScript to see the HTML underneath.
This approach ensures each item is indexed by search engines along with pertinent information: price, keywords, artist, title in this case. Because it's plain HTML, SEO and all the other tricks work the same way.
When a user visits the site on a mobile device they get the same simple, functional HTML representation that search engines do. When they visit on a desktop machine, the same page brings up a rich application. To the user it's a seamless experience that's tailored for the device they're running.
This technique doesn't just apply to OpenLaszlo - it can be used for any rich application, Flash or otherwise. Of course, OpenLaszlo 4.1 makes the process really easy with its deep linking and history management support, whether you are targeting Flash or DHTML. For more details, see chapter 15 of Laszlo in Action and the OpenLaszlo documentation.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:10 am
[...] OpenLaszlo blog has a great post on why this is not so big a news! addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mehtanirav.com%2F2008%2F07%2F03%2Frias-can-get-search-engine-friendly-now’; addthis_title = ‘RIAs+can+get+Search+Engine+friendly+now%21′; addthis_pub = ”; [...]
July 9th, 2008 at 1:48 am
I encountered a problem with the history function (FF3/DE/WinXP Prof. SP2):
I surfed the demo page, selected the first product (Spiderman II) and then on the new page selected “Sin City”, “Spiderman II” and “Sin City” (in this order).
The first click on the back button led me back to “Spiderman II”, the second to “Sin City” - so far so good. The next click should have taken me back to the “Spiderman II” info page, but had me look at the product overview page, instead.