How does Google read SWFAddress deep paths?

Question

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:

• In the hidden-HTML, a-href (hyperlink) to deep-links such as www.site.com/#/Topic1
• In the XML sitemap, list down the deep-links

Tried and tested methods:

• ?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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?