The SWFFix alpha is up

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Bobby put up the SWFFix alpha earlier today – I’ve been at the Ajax experience (with no wireless internet access, wtf?!) so haven’t had time to put together a post about it, but here’s a quick one.

We also announced that we are now working with Micheal Williams from Adobe – the author of the Adobe Flash Detection kit to make sure SWFFix can cover all the bases and be used by anyone. Very cool!

Go check out the dev blog and grab the files, then read the docs and try it out. Feedback is very welcome, so soak it in and let us know what you think.

11 thoughts on “The SWFFix alpha is up”

  1. Hey Geoff – any fix for the qtobject.js script and it not working in Internet Explorer 7. I can’t view any embedded video on
    your site and/or ones I’m developing.

    Your expert help would be appreciated.

    Cheers.

    Jody

  3. Sure, there’s never a guarantee that you won’t be penalized if you abuse any technique.

    There’s a recent post from a googler in the webmaster forum that talks about SWFObject you may be interested in:

    Here’s the text:

    Jason-

    Sorry for the late response! As you already know, talking about Flash
    and SEO can cause important conversations, and the same holds true
    here at Google. However, after soliciting the help of the inimitable
    Adam Lasnik and Greg Grothaus (et al.), I hope the following can clear
    up the running questions:

    The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to
    ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot.
    However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster’s
    intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text
    means webspam–e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably
    not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords
    are more likely to indicate webspam.

    I bring this up because, although your method is hiding text behind a
    very pretty Flash animation, you are still presenting the same content
    to both the user and the search engine, and offering it through
    different media. This should not harm your search rankings.

    However, Beussery raised a very good point when he said “Content in
    plain view is golden.” If ever your SWFObject were to display an
    “ElephantCo Car Trunks” logo while the standard HTML version was
    showing “ElephantCo Car Trunks–well suited to every vehicle from
    Altima to Z4!” then you would have stumbled into the realm of hiding
    text to modify search behavior, and have crossed over the black-hat
    line.

    I’ve looked over your example site, http://www.blitzagency.com/ and I
    like what I’ve seen. As you describe them, your methods are not
    trying to fool users or Search Engines, which means a good experience
    for both. Although the HTML versions of your pages are not always
    very user-friendly, e.g. visiting http://www.blitzagency.com/clients.html
    with javascript disabled loses the categorization and images
    associated shown in the flash version.

    The only concern I have is where links to your site will be pointing
    and what the link text may say. Googlebot deals with #anchors
    differently than ?arguments. Googlebot treats ?arguments as strict
    part of the URL string, but ignores #anchors, since in normal HTML,
    they all point to the same page…

    Because your (very ingenious) navigation scheme relies on #anchors and
    then dynamically loads the content in flash, the pages people go to
    might . A link pointing to http://www.blitzagency.com/aboutUs.html#clients
    should send pagerank to /aboutUs.html , though the text in the link
    may be associated with the content in clients.html. You could try to
    stop this by including “Link to this page” buttons to encourage
    linking with an #anchor-free URLs.

    Hope this clarifies things-
    -Bergy

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