Adobe Announces Flash will be Crawlable
One format that was never search engine friendly has been the Flash (SWF) format. It’s been a big closed, unfriendly box to search robots, until now. Adobe has announced they’ve given info to the big search engines about how to crawl Flash files.
The press release says:
The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
So, soon Google and others will index Flash files. Is that good or bad? I’m not sure.
For a lot of reasons, chief among them accessibility, I’ve tried to limit my uses of Flash to a minimum, but it’s become the de facto method for delivering video content. For search crawlers, these SWF files will be tricky because they usually call in a separate FLV video file. For the best SEO, you’ll want to robots to crawl your video description. Kyle has some good SEO tips.
Hopefully, this will not entice higher ed developers to use Flash more and more, especially for things like navigation, since it will be crawled. Badly designed and managed Flash is just as harmful as badly designed HTML.
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First off thanx for the link and secondly we have been able to do much of the nifty flash stuff using the jQuery library and that has been really awesome to just learn some of that. Because it’s javascript it’s much more crawl friendly.
So, even if Google can get to the content in flash will they be able to generate a link that can actually take you to the content? Otherwise the user is left to their own devices, hunting and pecking their way through a flash movie.
That’s a good question, I don’t think as web people we’d want users going directly to a SWF file. My hope is Google will count it as part of a page’s content. Let’s hope.