as most developers are aware, flash-based web sites don’t play that nicely with search engines. although google et al certainly can parse through SWFs and also index external XML files, the search results just seem to prove them wrong.

while developing a flash-based site recently, the client also requested an HTML alternate version of the site. not uncommon for a big company that wants to ensure their site works on iPhone as well. they also wanted deep-linking so that you can send links to pages WITHIN the flash site. thanks to SWFaddress, that’s not a problem.

now, putting one and the other together, I realized that I have a site that not only allows google to index all content – because of my HTML alternate version – but also allows me to re-direct users from any given HTML page to the equivalent deep-link inside the flash version.

consider that google indexes www.mysite.com/category/page1.html

that’s a regular HTML page, properly SEO’d. but it also embeds a small flash movie. that movie gets passed the file path (in this case: /category/page1.html) as a flash variable and then re-directs the user to the index page of the site. that index page, of course, has the main flash movie embedded. this main flash movie takes the flash variable and uses SWFaddress to display the page in question (in this case, the URL changes to www.mysite.com/#/category/page1/).

in the end, the user might see a blink of a redirect but we have successfully redirected to a deep-linked URL within our flash movie – while having fully indexed HTML pages.