There's a lot of buzz about today's announcement about Google's improved Flash indexing.
For those of you not obsessed with Flash or SEO, the reason this post is getting so much attention is simple: previously, Google's crawlers were unable to index text within Flash movies. Since quite a bit of content (on entertainment sites, especially) is locked up in Flash, a lot of stuff wasn't discoverable via search.
On the face of it, this is a huge boon for those sites that publish interesting content in Flash (like AOL's photo galleries). However, if you read deeper into the Google blog post, you'll see there are two deal breakers for most modern Flash sites.
The first: the crawler will not index Flash that is embedded in the page via Javascript. To avoid the IE ActiveX 'click to activate' security feature, the vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits are written into the page via Javascript. Thus, few of them will be indexed.
The second: The crawler will not index externally loaded SWFs or XML. The vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits load external information as SWFs or XML. The crawler will follow links to those items and index them separately, but that's fairly useless for the goal of increasing the relevance of the main page.
About all this will effect are designer and photographer portfolio websites, which generally have hardcoded text content. Not exactly an Earth-shattering move for the rest of the Flash-using web.
1 comment:
(I think this is the first time I visit your Blog).
I heard that Adobe recently released a special FlashPlayer for search engines. Not the kind of plugins that regular users can install in their browsers, but a tool for Google to be able to crawl .swf files.
This special player allows the robots to discover instances of 'Text' object and 'Buttons'. If the button makes an HTTP Request to load another .swf file, it will be loaded and inspected in the same way.
This is definitely a step forward, but Flash developers should start thinking how to make things discoverable.
In HTML, crawlers will certainly understand the tags P, H1, H2, A, UL, LI, etc. Now the should be able to see texts and buttons.
Complex interactivity cannot be inquired but just looking at Text, Buttons and HTTP Request. I think that things are getting better, but not there yet.
-Raul
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