Will Making Seprate Flash Pages w/php make more SEO Freindly

May 7th, 2008, 1:32 am

I been one of those people for years, however cool flash was to play with, figured it was never good to use to design websites. This was based on so many saying it wasn't SEO Friendly and also people using dial up might have a hard time waiting for it to fully load.

Now we are in the age of high speed so the dial up theory and flash might be offically dead. I don't know a single person that uses dial up now days, I'm sure there are some that still do but I think its gotten to the point where its as common as going to the bathroom every morning when you wake up. (sorry for the visual, its very late and the train is heading off the track and I'm not even going to attempt to get it back on).

As far as SEO though I was wondering if your making a dynamic flash site thats pulling in data using php with mysql and xml or both would that make it a bit more SEO friendly say opposed to making a flash site in just one file. Meaning the swf file is published on one html file and thats your entire site.

I guess what I mean to clairfy, say you got you index.html page, and it has an index.swf file. Then on the same page your pulling in data from your source with php and passing it to the swf file using name/value pair. The way i see you use php to echo the name/value pair which contains' the content your pulling in. Wouldn't search engines pick up the echo statement and that be viewable as content if you view source of the page? Then you make separate pages and swf files for your other pages that pull in content. Using that same method would your content get picked up by search engines for each of those pages?

I haven't yet tried this yet to see the results just something I been pondering as I attempt to learn more about flash. Thats all for now I'm going to bed Goodnight all.

May 7th, 2008, 2:46 am

I know of quite a few people that use dial up ... It's only in first world countries where there are almost no dial up users ...

but your theory doesn't seem far off track ... I don't know if it'll work but it's a good theory none the less ...

May 7th, 2008, 11:43 am

Yes that "dual content" type technique will work. There are many different types of implementation. Here's a good read about getting the content separate without actually making a duplicate.

As for the other reasons for not using Flash, they're pretty much empty. Flash doesn't have to be a huge file to download, in fact many swf's are smaller than image files. Its all about knowing how to build Flash so its accessible, bookmarkable, searchable, and so on. In the same way that paint companies aren't responsible for ugly houses, Flash itself can't be held responsible for "bad" websites.

May 7th, 2008, 1:41 pm

Thats an awsome article graphixboy thanks for the link i bookmarked to keep it as a reference. I figured what I suggested was done somewhere also as I sat and watched my many flash training videos, just made me think now how can I make it work with php and external data and what are all the downfalls.

That article put it all out there hopefully this weekend I get some time to sit down and play with flash and see what I can come up with.

I still like to hear other ideas people have tried around here with this technique and hear what they did to make it work