Flash Files Getting Partially Indexed
Posted: July 4th, 2008
The biggest news this week (at least from SEP’s perspective), is the announcement made by Adobe entitled, "Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web." According to the press release,
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
This is significant news to Flash developers and creators of other rich Internet applications (RIAs) and dynamic web content. Search engine spiders have always had difficulty in crawling and indexing Flash elements, and a website built completely from Flash may look fancy, but was a complete headache for search engine optimizers. By providing technology to Google and Yahoo, Adobe has enabled them to better index Flash content.
It’s also important to note that this announcement only involves the indexing and crawling of textual elements within Flash files. To be more precise, files with the SWF extension will have its textual elements crawled by Google and Yahoo, but .FLVs are still uncrawlable (or undiscoverable, as Adobe puts it).
More Caveats
Search engine optimization involves much more than whether a website can be crawled, although it plays a fundamental part in SEO. As you may know, good old fashion images are much easier to optimize for search engines than graphical components in Flash files, which at this point are still uncrawlable.
Flash files being generated from JavaScript might have issues if Google or Yahoo cannot execute the JavaScript code. Also, the search engines may index external files being called upon within the .SWFs, but they will not be associated to the .SWFs, which potentially creates duplicate content or just really bad linking structures.
Tags: Adobe, Flash, Google, indexing, Yahoo
I also just got special ‘newyear gift’ form...
Great news about flash files, well this will improve the indexing and search results!! Well I think that this was a very late step!! but better late then ever.
I subscribed to your RSS feed!! can’t get enough of your blog!!
take care
http://optimizingsearchengine.blogspot.com
This is good news. I think this is where art meet technology. Flash files are good to look at but are not search engine friendly. The spider seems not to recognize them very well. At least for now, those who put their effort into design rather than text gets their rightful reward too. Kudos and this is extreme good news.
Well the question is will ths .swf files rank high in SERP’s ???
I blogged about your post, very interesting!!!! I hope you don’t mind.
http://optimizingsearchengine.blogspot.com
Take Care
@Doudy:
Good question! I think that .SWFs won’t rank particularly high in SERPs compared to a normal HTML-coded website. Still, at least now a Flash-heavy website has a better chance of showing up if it has relevant text in it.
@The Golden Goose:
True, I wonder whether Google and Yahoo made requests to Adobe to release some of the technology such that they can create better spiders, or if Adobe realized that its users were losing out on the SEO game.
Great news that they will be indexed, but flash websites still suck. They suck for accessibility reasons, they suck for so many reasons. Then the splash pages, oh the splash pages. I wanted to visit your site in the first place, don’t make me click to actually visit your site.
I could go off on flash websites forever.