HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:
“Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”
Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…
What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
[Fact] The technology that Adobe is cooperating with Google and Yahoo! to achieve is to allow the search engine spider to crawl through a SWF file, navigating as is it was a normal user. The spider would then collect all text and links that occur at any state of the application, which then can be used in search results to the end user.
[Fact] External resources loaded into Flash are also indexed by the search engines. This was not the fact from the beginning but Google announced this in June 2009. This means that if the Flash file loads a XML-file containing the Flash solution’s text, this text will be associated to the Flash file.
[Fact] The search engine crawlers do support JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash (SWFObject & SWFObject2). This was not the case before the summer of 2009.
[Fact] There are ways to improve (and help) the search engine spiders to index your Flash content. Deep-linking is one way. Using one of the many solutions for deep-linking SWF content may improve how links can drive relevance to specific parts of an application and reflect a specific state of the SWF content. I have successfully used SWFAddress for this purpose in more than one occasion.
For complex sites you can also use techniques such as a site map XML file to highlight specific URLs to the search spider. Create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start the application from the correct subsection. This way you can get the benefits of a site that is indexed as a suite of pages. Read more about sitemaps for Flash here.
[Fact] Avoid using too much Flash. If you can, avoid creating the entire site in pure Flash. Though it is possible to make it optimized for search engines, it is usually discouraged. One reason for this is that you can’t weigh the different elements in Flash to tell the search engine how important they are. This is possible in HTML by placing information in header tags and so on. Though you are able to use CSS and HTML coding in your Flash text fields, it probably won’t weigh the same way as in HTML.
To make the best out of it build HTML into the Flash text fields (using .htmlText of the TextField class) and make sure you build the HTML-code to enhance the importance of the text elements as if you build the site in HTML. Use links, headings and other HTML tags.
HTML fallback
It is always good to provide users with a HTML fallback. This helps in many ways. Users without the proper Flash Player installed or maybe running without JavaScript will fail to see your conent when opening your site. A pure HTML fallback solution with provide them with the information they need but without the user experience that the Flash solution is there for. Another big advantage is that the HTML fallback will provide info for the search engine crawlers and index the content on your site.
Does it work?
How good do the search engine crawlers really index Flash content? To be honest I’m not sure and I am not completely convinced that they do their job good enough. But there is really not much more to do with it. Let’s hope Adobe and Google/Yahoo! take this seriously enough to continuously improve their crawlers to index the SWF content out there.
Sources:
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/ora_seo_flash.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html
Flash and Search Engine Optimization
HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:
Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…
What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
[Fact] The technology that Adobe is cooperating with Google and Yahoo! to achieve is to allow the search engine spider to crawl through a SWF file, navigating as is it was a normal user. The spider would then collect all text and links that occur at any state of the application, which then can be used in search results to the end user.
[Fact] External resources loaded into Flash are also indexed by the search engines. This was not the fact from the beginning but Google announced this in June 2009. This means that if the Flash file loads a XML-file containing the Flash solution’s text, this text will be associated to the Flash file.
[Fact] The search engine crawlers do support JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash (SWFObject & SWFObject2). This was not the case before the summer of 2009.
[Fact] There are ways to improve (and help) the search engine spiders to index your Flash content. Deep-linking is one way. Using one of the many solutions for deep-linking SWF content may improve how links can drive relevance to specific parts of an application and reflect a specific state of the SWF content. I have successfully used SWFAddress for this purpose in more than one occasion.
For complex sites you can also use techniques such as a site map XML file to highlight specific URLs to the search spider. Create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start the application from the correct subsection. This way you can get the benefits of a site that is indexed as a suite of pages. Read more about sitemaps for Flash here.
[Fact] Avoid using too much Flash. If you can, avoid creating the entire site in pure Flash. Though it is possible to make it optimized for search engines, it is usually discouraged. One reason for this is that you can’t weigh the different elements in Flash to tell the search engine how important they are. This is possible in HTML by placing information in header tags and so on. Though you are able to use CSS and HTML coding in your Flash text fields, it probably won’t weigh the same way as in HTML.
To make the best out of it build HTML into the Flash text fields (using .htmlText of the TextField class) and make sure you build the HTML-code to enhance the importance of the text elements as if you build the site in HTML. Use links, headings and other HTML tags.
HTML fallback
It is always good to provide users with a HTML fallback. This helps in many ways. Users without the proper Flash Player installed or maybe running without JavaScript will fail to see your conent when opening your site. A pure HTML fallback solution with provide them with the information they need but without the user experience that the Flash solution is there for. Another big advantage is that the HTML fallback will provide info for the search engine crawlers and index the content on your site.
Does it work?
How good do the search engine crawlers really index Flash content? To be honest I’m not sure and I am not completely convinced that they do their job good enough. But there is really not much more to do with it. Let’s hope Adobe and Google/Yahoo! take this seriously enough to continuously improve their crawlers to index the SWF content out there.
Sources:
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/ora_seo_flash.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html