Different URLs for different areas of a Flash site.

[shane-c]

The title is pretty self-explanatory...

I've seen it done before, but I'm not sure how. Any help would be awesome, even if it's just telling me what to search for on Google (I've tried some searches, but with no luck so far).

Thanks :beer:

[REEF·]

I'm learning it myself, their documentation is hard to figure out for non-programmers though.

It's called SWFAddress and supposedly it works great for SWFObject. I got a simple version (which would be nice to download as well if they had it) working with 2.0, let me know if you can get a few buttons / transitions working with 3.0.

[shane-c]

Cool, I'll look into that, thanks.

[shane-c]

Well, I looked more into SWFAddress. It is pretty cool, but it has some annoying problems that make me hesitant to use it at all.

First, it makes ugly URLs. That is unfortunate for obvious reasons.

Second, it makes URLs with a '#' in them. Google doesn't like that. They make it "work" for URLs without the '#', but it's through some redirecting trickery that puts the '#' back in the URL anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose for SEO, because inbound links to your site will have different URLs than those that Google has referenced.

For example, the link http://www.nike.com/nikelab/site.html?en_US#/product/akribis/detail takes you to the Nike Lab Flash site that uses SWFAddress, to the section of the Flash movie about the shoe called Akribis. However, if you search for "nike lab akribis" on Google, it doesn't come up at all.

So it is handy for linking, but it doesn't look very pretty.

[Anogar]

I'm learning it myself, their documentation is hard to figure out for non-programmers though.

It's called SWFAddress and supposedly it works great for SWFObject. I got a simple version (which would be nice to download as well if they had it) working with 2.0, let me know if you can get a few buttons / transitions working with 3.0.

To clarify, it works only with SWFObject.


First, it makes ugly URLs. That is unfortunate for obvious reasons.

Second, it makes URLs with a '#' in them. Google doesn't like that. They make it "work" for URLs without the '#', but it's through some redirecting trickery that puts the '#' back in the URL anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose for SEO, because inbound links to your site will have different URLs than those that Google has referenced.

Google doesn't index Flash content embedded with JS anyway, and it heavily makes use of JS.

[shane-c]

^ Good point.

The linking and back/forward button compatibility is pretty cool, but overall the whole thing seems incomplete, unfortunately... I probably won't use it.

Anogar, do you know of any good alternatives? Or is this just something the internet isn't ready for yet...

*EDIT: I did find one intriguing example, however... In Google, search for "jsk architekten" - it's a company whose site is Flash, and uses SWFAddress, or something similar. The first result of this search is just their base URL, which makes sense. But under that you can see that the Profile section of their site has also been indexed. The indexed link is www.jsk.de/en/company.html, but when you click it, it changes to http://www.jsk.de/en/company/profile.html#/en/company/profile. When you view the source for that page, you can see that all of the page's content is in the HTML, but is replaced with Flash by javascript. If you look at any other section of their site, they don't have any HTML content, it's all just Flash embedded with javascript - and those sections aren't indexed by Google.

Just thought that was interesting.

[REEF·]

So it is handy for linking, but it doesn't look very pretty.Well I just answered what you asked for in the first post, you didn't say anything about making it pretty.

Even 2advanced has a # in their links and the pages dont get indexed into google. So it's either you have a # and dont get indexed, or dont have a # and still dont get indexed (pagewise). It's more of how much traffic you can bring to your website without deep-page searches ... once you have a lot then you can add the # if it was bothering you too much before.

If you were a Java/script/ajax guru, maybe you can figure out a way to remove the #?

[Anogar]

When you view the source for that page, you can see that all of the page's content is in the HTML, but is replaced with Flash by javascript. If you look at any other section of their site, they don't have any HTML content, it's all just Flash embedded with javascript - and those sections aren't indexed by Google.

Just thought that was interesting.


style="visibility:hidden;"

It's total dummy content for spider indexing, and they're probably using some clever URL masking - which is totally an option with SWFAddress.