Flash and SEO: what am I missing?

Question

We're trying to get our company website to be better indexed by Google and other search engines, and at this point I'm not quite sure what's missing. All of our text content is loaded in by our flash application via XML files.

In summer, we wrote a PHP script that reads out all the XML files, and generates google friendly index.html files in subdirectories. The files include navigatable links to other sections in the site, and HTML content of the XML files.

For example, for our 'work' section in the flash site, there will be an index.html file generated in the following directory: site.com/work/index.html

This file contains links to other sections of the site (site.com/overview, site.com/contact) which all have appropriate index.html files. So people who hit those links can see the site properly, that page actually loads in the site swf from the root directory and goes to the appropriate section of the site automatically. Ie, if you hit site.com/work/ in your browser, you will see the Flash application and be directed to the 'work' section within it. However, if you browse the site without javascript/flash enabled, you can actually see a series of html links and some paragraphs/text content.

This was all done before Google's announcement in June of being able to index external content loaded into SWFs (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html).

Unfortunately, google seems to only have indexed the main page at site.com (even though they say they are capable of indexing flash sites as a user sees them, as above, but I don't even see that working.)

A couple days ago, I figured a few things may have been missing, so I did the following: - submitted a sitemap.xml file to google. It sees 49 URLs, but has only indexed 1. How long would google take to index those files? - our main site.com/index.html only had the swf embedded, it didn't have any HTML links to the subsections, so I added those in swfobjects no flash content area - I gathered google wasn't seeing the generated HTML files and instead seeing the embedded SWF, so I disallowed the swf file and the swfobject.js file in the robots.txt file

Do the last 3 changes make sense? If so, how long after implementing them should I expect to see some results? Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

If you've added links from your homepage to the other content pages, that's a great start. Also including a sitemap.xml file to Google will give you more exposure.

Depending on how you're adding the links to your homepage will also make a difference. Personally I'd add them into the footer of the document as raw HTML. If they're being added into the flash no-content area, you may get different results. Also if the HTML links are inserted using Javascript you'll also get different results.

Google are pretty good at knowing which content is meant for real users. They even seem to take website colours into account. i.e. black links on a black background will be less likely to rank, or to rank highly, compared to other coloured links on a black background.

The time it takes to get indexed can drastically vary. I've had sites take 3 months and sites take half a day. It really just depends.

Answer 2

Not sure if you already know that, but you can know the number of URL that google has indexed from your site.

Just search for site:www.yoursite.com That way you can know if your site URLs can be displayed on search results. You can submit huge sitemaps, but the way to know if they are being indexed is this.