« Yahoo Adds Targeting to Search and Content Ads | Main | Google Adds Partners and Ads to Hosted News »
March 17, 2009
Adobe Launches SEO Technology Center for Flash
In the not-so-distant past, sites built using Adobe's Flash technology were invisible to search engines. Both search engines and SEOs have continued to work on ways to make those pages show up better in search results. Last summer, Adobe lent a hand, by providing its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo to help them figure out how to better index sites and pages created with Flash.
This week, Adobe went a step further, launching a new SEO Technology Center for Flash to help developers and other content creators build Flash applications in more search-friendly ways. The site, part of the Adobe Developer Connection, explains current SEO challenges and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices to overcome them.
Although the search engines are currently working on improving their indexing of Flash content, Adobe advises that at this point, it's still best to offer them an HTML representation of the content. They explain that this could be done via hidden DIV tags, which they admit is considered to be hidden text by some, and may get you banned by Google if you're not showing the same content there as you are in the Flash file. They suggest using the NOSCRIPT tag, since Flash files are called via JavaScript, and the search engines don't use JavaScript in their crawlers.
Adobe advises setting up separate HTML pages for each important topic area of your site, and deep-linking to the proper area of the SWF file from each of those pages. That's a best practice for non-Flash SEO as well, since a page that focuses more on a given topic is likely to rank better for keywords around that topic, while a page with six or seven topics is not likely to rank well for any of them.
There's lots more great content on the new SEO Technology Center for Flash, so if you've got a site that uses Flash, or are considering building one, you should definitely take the time to read as much as you can about it before moving forward.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on March 17, 2009 12:06 PM
Comments
James Mann March 18, 2009 4:32 AM
We have just started to embed flash into our sites properly so google can recognise it instead of hiding it in a div in the html code. This technology centre will be really helpful for our company as we are looking for better ways to make flash more SEO friendly to help boost search engine rankings for companies.
I will have to bookmark the site for future reference. Thanks for a great post.
Oliver Blake March 18, 2009 10:42 AM
I still see a lot of challenges here - storing text in noscript tags is no cure-all either. There is no question Flash has a huge market share, but I think Adobe should be focussing on working out technical solutions that do not require web masters jumping through this many hoops if they expect this effort to yield real benefits.
Jolt March 18, 2009 1:43 PM
Adobe SEO Technology Center for Flash will surely help lot of Flash website to ranked better in google. The dark age of flash seo will end soon. Web developer can express their creativity without holding back anymore, because they can use Flash content without fear of SEO.
Newell and Budge.com July 29, 2009 10:27 PM
>Web developer can express their creativity without holding back anymore
Web designers will probably always keep their creativity to themselves in cases where usability and functionality are compromised.
Also, they will still have to provide an HTML presentation, so nothing much has changes apart from the fact that certain steps have been taken in a certain direction.
Kathy September 24, 2009 8:23 AM
Flash SEO should take a close look at the output of the terminal. This shows exactly what was encountered for the given application. The API is not public nor is it known how Google will utilize SWF text content or weigh it against HTML text. Both of these are obviously secret for a good reason.
Seo Service December 7, 2009 6:31 AM
Flash SEO should take a close look at the output of the terminal. This shows exactly what was encountered for the given application. The API is not public nor is it known how Google will utilize SWF text content or weigh it against HTML text. Both of these are obviously secret for a good reason.
Seo Service December 7, 2009 6:31 AM
Its about time Adobe Flash becomes more SEO friendly. Its probably the only thing that is holding Flash back. Finally we may actually be able to do away with HTML web sites altogether, as even to do the most simple things, it takes a whole heap of coding and style sheets. When it comes to flash, there isnt a whole lot of things that it cant do. I would say its on a par, if not striving further ahead, in terms of pros and cons of flash and HTML.