SWFAddress 2.0 part 3 - Ajax and SEO

In the third and last part of the SWFAddress 2.0 presentation series I would like to give an overview of the two major features that this release introduces.

My personal experiments with deep linking actually started with Ajax and later I used the experience to create SWFAddress. Because of this the Ajax support has always been a matter of time and after the 1.1 release it became a standard user request. As you probably know there are many solutions of this type and every major JavaScript library have this functionality available natively or in the form of a plugin. The usage of SWFAddress will only make sense if it's better that the rest and now I'm going to explain why SWFAddress 2.0 really becomes the best offering at the moment.

As it was mentioned in the firts part of this series, SWFAddress is already deployed on many websites. This fact generated a huge amount of feedback and I have never been indifferent to appropriate and possible improvements. When we say that SWFAddress supports Opera 9 or Safari 1.3 we really ensure that it does so. While most of the other scripts are coming up with their serialization formats which are appropriate for specific framework or component state, SWFAddress tries to stick as much as possible with concepts clean URLs, standard query parameters and unobtrusive behavior. Features like custom titles, transparent page view tracking and event listeners are also not that common across similar solutions. And last but certainly not least, there are affordable support and development services which some people find useful.

For some time there is an Ajax sample available on the SWFAddress homepage which wasn't there without a reason. Today I'm happy to announce that we have an indexable unobtrusive Ajax content which can be accessed from Google, Yahoo or MSN. It's written in PHP and uses an innovative SEO mechanism which I'm going to describe below. To finalize the Ajax overview I also want to mention the Coherence sample that showcases how multiple Flash files can be used together with XHR and opens a lot of interesting opportunities.

Last year SWFAddress came up with a deep linking SEO solution that works. It was a little complex, but various people dared to use it and achieved the result they've dreamed about. The approach wasn't perfect, the complex URL rewriting was often causing troubles and worst of all was the fact that it was 'cloaking', a term that makes people paranoid because of the Google guidelines. We never experienced or heard about issues or penalties because of this technique, but overall this was a stopper for lots of the SWFAddress adopters. Companies like BLITZ implemented their own much safer SEO solution on top of SWFAddress, but it still isn't perfect because of the ambiguous deep link anchors generated with JavaScript.

With SWFAddress 2.0 I can offer you a new approach which in my opinion has enormous potential. It's not very simple because it relies on JavaScript redirection which should be non-sneaky, but it works quite well and produces the clean results that we want. The technique works like a progressive enhancement and a site like this can be first developed without any Flash or Ajax code. SWFAddress adds a tricky synchronous XHR on top of all this and ensures that after the redirect the HTML content won't be different. URL rewriting is used again, but this time it's very minimalistic and most of the logic is implemented with a server-side language. SWFAddress 2.0 offers you a choice between PHP, JSP or Rails and even if you don't like the encapsulation of the code, you'll be able to grab the core logic and implement it as you like.

As always we did some real testing using our SEO sample and the technique seems to work quite well.

The release is coming tomorrow. Make sure you won't miss it!