Search Engine Optimization

Adobe teams with Yahoo and Google to Crawl Flash

Adobe, Google and Yahoo join to make Flash content searchable. Adobe, Google, Yahoo immediately makes flash and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player on thousands of Web sites visible to search from thousands of Web sites. – Eweek.com

Adobe made an announcement today.

According to Ryan Stewart Adobe is giving out new technology to search engines. As search engines stumble onto flash websites, this technology, which is sitting on search engine servers, gets activated. It acts like regular user and presses buttons, browses flash website and most importantly extracts text and links.

Webmaster don’t have to change anything on their websites. Technology is designed to work with all flash-based websites.

Adobe approached Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. There was hostility with Microsoft, and according to “The Register” Microsoft is left out:

Adobe told The Register it’s talked to different groups inside Microsoft to use the version of Flash Player with that company’s struggling Live Search service. No agreement has been reached, and negotiations are no longer active, Adobe said. Microsoft of course has a corporate axe to grind with Adobe. Microsoft has an online media content creation and runtime environment alternative to Adobe’s Flash and AIR, called Silverlight. Not so long ago, it also attempted to rival PDF with XML Paper in Office.- The Register

Google proves why they’re #1 – flash crawling active on July 1st

We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. – Webmaster Central

• Text and links can now be crawled. Links within Flash are now treated as regular links.
• Non textual content like images and video is not crawled. Google does not see it.
• Google bot does not execute some types of JavaScript. if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
• Content that is loaded separately by the flash file, is considered separate from your website, at least for now.
• Flash in Hebrew and Arabic cannot be indexed yet
• FLV files are not crawalable(videos)

According to Search Engine Land, Yahoo is still working on this technology:

“Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.”

Search Engine Optimization

• Searcher experience is better served by Flash implementations that provide a unique URL for each set of content.
• Some Flash implementations dynamically load text as the user interacts with the application, but the URL remains the same. In this scenario, Google bot can now follow those interactions (in a limited way) and if the URL doesn’t change, then all content that is dynamically loaded as the interactions progress is associated with a single URL… This means that if the content that is dynamically loaded into the Flash application from the fifth interaction matches a searcher query, that Flash application may be served in the search results. But when the searcher clicks over to that result, the content won’t be found on the page. The searcher will have to interact with the application until that content is loaded. Searchers may instead feel frustrated and abandon the page.

Also keep in mind that most flash websites contain little text and rely on images, video and animations. Flash SEO is still tricky business, but it’s gotten easier. Firms that work with marketers who insist on flash, as noted above – plug in a lot of text and keywords into the flash and provide separate URL for each content set. This way search engines can serve the exact page where relevant content is found.

Microsoft is left out

Bad news for Microsoft and it’s Live Search. Flash crawling is one of biggest developments this year and search engines cannot afford to miss it. This time Microsoft’s ambitions for Adobe market got on their way to a better search engine.