RIA Sucks for SEO… So Far
Posted on February 25, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimisation |
There’s nothing like being handed a brand new topic to research - especially when you’re running on less than adequate sleep. I was recently asked to investigate why an implementation of a magazine / catalogue reader application wasn’t being indexed very well by Google, despite the software makers assertions that it was designed to be Search Engine Friendly (SEF). After a little snooping I discovered that I had practically no knowledge of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and the SEO implications thereof outside a few vague assumptions.
The application in question is the sort of thing that lets you browse magazines and similar print publications online. You may or may not be familiar with Zinio or the New York Times Newsstand electronic newspaper. I wasn’t, though I’d seen similar software in use previously but never paid it much heed.
What is a Rich Internet Application?
I’m feeling lazy so I’ll reference the wiki:
Rich Internet applications (RIA) are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server.
RIAs typically:
- run in a web browser, or do not require software installation,
- run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox
SEO for RIA, OMG WTF? XML Not SEF!
Anyway, as far as I could discern the SEO problems with RIA’s are rooted in the fact that such applications are pure flash or AJAX or some other BS that gives nothing to the spiders to chew on. The pages get indexed but have no content other than titles and descriptions. The only other text content in the source is the “you need javascript to use this” in the
Worst of all, it uses XML sitemaps to cram these empty pages into the G hole. I didn’t really twig on to that being a bad thing until i read about it on daveN but it seems obvious that XML sitemaps are not always a good idea for getting pages indexed.
Ok.. question…
Is it true that the big 4 search engines are all link based, this means that for a page to do well in a Search Engine it needs 2 things .. internal links and external links ?
So that in mind if a Search Engine can’t find a page on your site, would it not be better to go get a link or two and point it to that page, that way we know the SE has found your site by a method which it values !
and
I would rather have 10 pages indexed from a 1000 page site than 1000 pages included in a index because of an XML sitemap, IMO XML sitemaps are a quick route to supplemental hell. Make your SEO’s life easier and don’t use an XML sitemap.
I had a hell of a lot of trouble getting an example of this technology to rank for “exact match string in quotes” and in the end found one page on one site out of two dozen or so I tested. This suggests that it works, but not very well!
Will RIA Always Suck for SEO?
Probably not but this assertion may hold true for a good while yet. I read somewhere that Adobe and Google were doing some stuff to come up with a better moustrap and a way to crawl and interpret flash content. Throw in a bit of SVG and OCR and you might even have text within image and video showing up in the SERPs.
Can These Issues Be Overcome?
The only solutions I could find (or come up with) were to:
- Stuff page content into the noscript
tag. Mmm cloaky - google loves cloaky - Layer DHTML beneath the flash content. Still a bit cloaky.
- Noindex or orphan the subdomain so it doesn’t drag the rest of the site down with shitty pages
- Create a static version of the content and perhaps embed the RIA or redirect to it somehow. We want the catalogue content to draw in organic traffic on it’s own, though.
- Add some related keyword rich text on the page below the fold (but top of the code).
Hmm… if it’s do-able that last one sounds like it might just work 
Got any suggestions or know a better way to do SEO for RIA?
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2 Responses to “RIA Sucks for SEO… So Far”
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I cringe when people demand flash sites. Unless you have a firm brand name, people won’t find you in SERPs for many keyterms, let alone for longtail terms.
I think you’ve covered all the main suggestions for optmising a site for RIAs. I remember theres something in Google’s guidelines which talks about how to overcome this as well.
Nothing is really beyond their reach though. Especially when you consider how they’re talking about crawling videos and using speech recognition so people can search within videos. Madness… but I love it.
hi rob, cheers for the great comment
turns out the company is cloaking the content after all which would have been nice to know up front. I don’t think it’s all that dodgy cos the content is the same as what’s in the catalogues so it’s actually serving a legitimate purpose
the partial indexing issues i think are due to a lack of interlinking between the pages so i got them to fix that up, we’ll see how it goes