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Ted Patrick - Events & Community @ Adobe Systems
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SEO and Flex Directory Build 003
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Published
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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12:55 PM
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I just posted a new build of the Flex Directory here. I made changes to test an SEO theory in regard to attributes vs element values. When a spider looks at the XML of the Flex Directory they see an XML file but I changed the nodes to <div/> elements and moved the company names into the element as the value. If the theory holds here, the search engines will be exposed to the company data and search results should return when company names are searched. This change is a test and we will have to wait and see if the search engines grab ahold of the new schema and parse the data correctly. My hunch is that spiders typically are programmed to ignore attributes since they are 100% used for markup and never contain textual data relavant to SEO.Special thanks to Doug McCune and Eric at Space150.com for helping with the SEO optimization their comments on the last few posts has been invaluable. Ideally if this test works then we have a really solid SEO model for Flash based UI. I chose to use DIV elements to hold the various company data but this could prove to be the real test. What elements the spiders like to work with is quite the mystery. Sure I could target microformats or xhtml but this test is designed to be incremental so we can measure the change. I will be testing other schemas too.
Flex Directory Build 003
Test, Test, Test, Optimize, Test, Test, Test! Fingers crossed! Loaded and Launched!
Cheers,
Ted :)
10 Responses to “SEO and Flex Directory Build 003”
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I would argue that some attributes could be used as part of SEO. For example, my document might contain titled abbreviations with semantic value that crawlers would find interesting:
<abbr title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</abbr>
The issue is more that the crawler schema is based on the html. Agreed title and alt are relavant on certain elements. It would be a good test to leverage using alt and other common schemas in future tests.
Ted :)
Am I correct that it's a pitty that you can only set the URL fragment (= part after #) using Flex (or any other tool)? Setting the fragment allows people to share deeplinks into your application but Google only stores the URL without the fragment it seems. This way it seems to me that it's rather hard to build a SEO-optimised content management solution using Flex... Am I correct?
Interesting, but PLEASE do something about the e-mail addresses being exposed. No one wants their e-mail address part of an SEO effort. Please use a URL instead of an e-mail address (either to a company's home page or their contact page per their submission).
Thanks and love the blog, Ted!
I'm guessing the non-standard attributes will be ignored, and only the text nodes within the div will be picked up.
This is an clever test, Ted! I'm interested to see the results.
Nice blog.
Interesting
http://pinkyseo.blogspot.com
nice comments. thanks
Wakozi (www.wakozi.com), a site built entirely on Flex, is looking for a person to optimize our SEO. If anyone is interested in taking on this project, please email us at support@wakozi.com. Thanks.
Ted, I like your blog.
The link to http://directory.onflex.org/ does not work...it redirects to another place.
May i ask where the only - supposedly - proof regarding the SEO issue has gone??