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July 1, 2008
Adobe Provides Flash Technology to Google and Yahoo for Better Indexing
For years SEOs have been about the inability of search engines to crawl flash pages. But now Adobe is making an effort to keep Flash in the web development toolbox. They've announced the provision of Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to facilitate the indexing of sites and pages created with Flash.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, an FAQ was posted offering up more details about the update. Here are some highlights:
- Google will now be able to better crawl the text content of SWF files. The content includes buttons, menus, self-contained websites developed in Flash and "everything in between."
- Google can use the text it crawls to provide a descriptive "snippet" for its search results.
- Links included in Flash content will also be crawled.
- If your Flash file is loaded by JavaScript, Google won't be able to read it
- If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file, Google will index that separately from the original Flash file.
Google says it can't crawl images, videos or FLV files because they do not contain text content.
What do you think about search engines crawling Flash? Are you more inclined to use Flash on your sites now? Leave your reaction in the comments!
Posted by Nathania Johnson at July 1, 2008 9:54 AM
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Comments
We all know flash has never had SEO functionality, so seo'ers have never bothered with Flash. There is no doubt though that flash can increase conversions because it is appealing to the visitor.
Lately I've been doing research into increasing conversion rates on landing pages. If Adobe is now releasing a search engine friendly flash version I'm really interested to know more.
Together with quality content, incoming links and well designed flash, a site will have the appeal of both human and bot.. a winning combination!
Posted by: Neil Pursey at July 2, 2008 1:16 AM
Hi guys,
I have always loved to design in flash but have for awhile now. Stopped for SEO reason's if google can crawl this again, I'll be straight back on the band wagon.
Cheers,
Jesse
Posted by: Jesse at July 2, 2008 4:50 AM
