Comment by marginalia_nu
3 years ago
Doesn't really check with how most modern SPAs flourish despite having basically the same problems as Flash of being incompatible with most web crawlers since more often than not you can't trust what they decide to put in the URL bar (if anything) actually links back to the state that is on screen.
>> modern SPAs
Right. It's possible now because of things like Puppeteer. That's fairly recent. Nothing like that existed in the early 2000s to allow crawlers to index either Flash, Java embeds, Proce55ing apps or Javascript content. All scripting was a black box to Google as much as it was to Altavista. You had to place ancillary noscript content on each page to make it accessible to robots. That held true for Javascript apps well into the mid-2010s. My point is that we actually could index Flash sites now if we wanted to, just as we do with Javascript SPAs... however no one was making JS SPAs in the early 2000s, and search penalty was one major reason single page Flash sites fell out of use. The fact that JS SPAs have moved in now to occupy the empty niche left by ES4/AS3 really just proves it was a good and necessary idea for certain types of sites that was kneecapped by Adobe's closed source and the direction the web and search was taking.
SPAs have marketing websites that take care of search engine indexing. They also pay to have ads show up on Row 1 when people search for their product.
This was still possible back in the Flash days to be fair, at least the marketing page side of things.
Everyone I ever wrote a SPA flash site for (including lots of custom carts / online stores), I also wrote HTML-only versions for that were mostly used by crawlers. I made sure these contained the same content as the SPA, and that the SPA would jump to the appropriate section and "page" or product based on the links, since it was understood that Google might penalize search rank if it were found that your flash content didn't mirror the HTML content that would otherwise appear at a given URL. (I'm not sure whether it was a myth, but I heard they had actual humans verify this drom time to time).
The purpose of the Flash app was to make the site more beautiful, not to obfuscate the content.