Many people think that deep linking and back button support in a Flash application are impossible. Scott Nelson who writes a number of modules for Drupal, a very popular and growing PHP framework for creating dynamic websites like this one, has created a cool website for a client that uses a combination of Flash, Drupal, JavaScript and search engine optimization. The site is for the XXX, and as you can see from this Google index (link removed), the entire site is indexed in Google. Clicking on any of the Google links results in the proper Flash page being loaded, after a quick trip to the main page of the site (by design).

Here's Scott's explanation on how he did this: "I built an html version of the site first to be used as the admin and the indexable content. You can see this by disabling javascript. Then, I use swfobject on the front page to replace the body tag with my swf. For all the other pages, I do a javascript redirect for anonymous users only to the homepage, including a hashed version of the url they landed on. Search engine spiders don't read javascript, so they view the entire site as HTML. When you click into a subpage from a search engine index, you are redirected to the Flash version of the page. Also, the swf includes back button functionality with history, and deep-linking capability. All major browsers seem to work except no back button in Safari."

Have you got any other tips on SEO optimization for Flash / Flex applications?