SWFAddress claims that it is search-engine friendly, but how is one supposed to feed the deep-links into search engines like Google? Because in all my SWFAddress-powered websites, not a single deep-link shows up in Google.
Tried and failed methods:
Tried and tested methods:
The sitemap method should work, you'd have to submit it on http://www.google.com/sitemaps if google doesnt find it itself, then just wait, it could take some time for the pages to be indexed even after google reads the sitemap file.
Google doesn't index / store deep-linked URLs in any way.
The Flash Search Player 9 itself does not retrieve / pass URLs to the Virtual User (search engine)
See here for more details.
Take a look at Google's Making AJAX Applications Crawlable. You could work on modifying swfAddress to use the #! instead of just the #. The problem with this is I believe you'll still need to create HTML snapshot pages for Google.
Another approach that works if you're using PHP/mySQL or something like it (works great for having the content searchable and indexed) is to use a FlashVar on a PHP page. This way if content showed up in a search result and the visitor clicks the link the PHP page (and they have the Flash plugin), the FlashVar/SWFObject would trigger the display of the Flash content. If there's no plugin available, they'll see the content served from the PHP/mySQL.
One thing that really helped me understand how Google sees webpages was to use the Fetch As Googlebot in WebmasterTools. I imagine if you fed it one of the hash-frag swfAddress pages it wouldn't see anything specific to that content.
A sitemap is good, but I'm not sure if it really works. What happens when Googlebot hits those urls, is there content there to index?
