July 04, 2008 | Friday
Google Now Crawling Flash
By James Lowery - SEO Strategist in Latitude Publications |Articles |Marketing |News |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo |Search Expertise |Search Research |Search Technology |SEO
Just about the biggest development in search right now is the news that Adobe have licensed new technology to Google and Yahoo that will allow them to index some Flash content.
In the past, telling web developers and site owners that the beautiful Flash driven website that they’ve spend thousands of pounds designing is completely inaccessible to search engines, and advising them that if they want to rank well for their target keywords they’re going to have to make some pretty substantial changes has been a real sticking point in many SEO campaigns. Thankfully, all this is about to change.
The big question is why has it taken so long to get to this point? After all, Adobe and previously Macromedia could have released the coding structure of the system to search partners years ago as they did with PDF, so why now?
This can be summed up in two words:
Silverlight and AJAX
Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Rich Internet Applications system has some pretty neat features, and there are already some really cool websites that have been designed using it. It’s not yet making a serious dent in the Flash market share, but with the resources of Microsoft pushing it, you can be certain that it won’t be long before it makes a real impact on the market. It is no coincidence that Adobe’s press release pointedly states that the new Flash crawling technology is only accessible to Google and Yahoo.
Couple this with the fact that Microsoft have now got a joined-up approach to their software development cycle to enable future versions of Live Search to index the Silverlight format, and you can see why it will become attractive to developers who don’t want to compromise the look of their website for search engine rankings.
The bigger challenge facing Adobe is AJAX. While in the past you needed proprietary software like Flash to create the kind of rich Internet experience that users enjoy, the growth of AJAX-driven websites and the ease with which they can be built using existing technologies that don’t cost a fortune will no doubt have resulted in some brown trousers round the Adobe boardroom table in San Jose.
Properly implemented, AJAX can create a user experience that is just as compelling as Flash, and it can also be completely search engine friendly, meaning that you don’t need to compromise on your SEO to have an attractive website.
Still, the ability for search engines to crawl Flash is going to be good for everyone. But there are limitations, so before developers go crazy with Creative Suite, it’s important to remember that search engines still cannot accurately read text embedded within images, so make sure that any text is properly formatted using XML and imported into the SWF file.
In addition it’s important to provide a plain HTML version of the content for your website visitors who don’t have Flash, for example, those with text-only browsers or screen readers.
Comments
#1
Crawling and ranking are still very different things. As Flash doesn’t support heading tags (h1, h2, etc) or offer unique descriptions, titles, etc. for individual frames, it will still be a while before sites built entirely in Flash will have a real chance at ranking against sites rendered in standard based HTML.