Comments on: Flash search engine experiment

By: Quantic

Quantic — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:39:28 +0000

Your first word has been indexed successfully.

By: Roy

Roy — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:37:56 +0000

I’m pretty confident that you’ll only ever going to find text that is in text fields on the stage. Nothing that gets set dynamically. Indexing content that gets set through actionscript would require the seach engine to interpret the code. Google, apparently, is working on a javascript engine for their bot (allowing AJAX based site to be indexed more easily), but actionscript is likely to be much further down their wishlist.

If you read my original article, you’ll see that the SFWObject method of embedding the Flash movie into HTML offers the ability to add content that will only be seen by people without Flash and SEs. If you’re really using a plain text file, why not have a simple PHP script dump the entire contents of that file into the html page? That could be done in one or two lines of code I believe… a simple include statement even perhaps? I for one would really like to know if that works for your client.

PS. The tutorial you’re referring to is ancient. if you’re still using “loadVariables”, you might want to look up “LoadVars” in the Actionscript Dictionary for newer ways to load external content.

By: shorescores

shorescores — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:26:39 +0000

Cool experiment and one I NEED to find an answer to ASAP. According to this URL: http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn.asp?id=1774&index=32 using an external plain text file and a Dynamic Text Field, the search engines didn’t seem to pick up on it. “Conclusion: A Flash site that loads most of its information dynamically is probably SOL from an SEO perspective.” This, if true, is not want I wanted to find out. That is exactly what I am trying to do for a client, who wants to manage her own content. * So, I am hoping you find out something different in your experiment. Otherwise, it’s all about PHP, .NET, WordPress or something else that my client will have to pay for and learn. Updating a Plain Text file and having it render in a Dynamic Text Field was (I though) the perfect solution… My fingers are still crossed that there is some encouraging news from your test here.

Thanks!

ShoreScores