Flash: Crawlable at Last!
Once the bane of all who wanted to mix form and function on the internet, Adobe has created a system to make Flash-based websites crawlable by search engines.
“Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of [Rich Internet Applications] and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player.”- Adobe.com
Previously, search engine bots could “see” Flash objects, but could not delve into them and read information like a human user could. This led to SEO best practices shunning websites with all-Flash navigation elements, or questionable SEO tactics like cloaking, where the search engine bots are shown a different website than the user. Websites would have to be created in a Flash and HTML version, thereby vastly increasing the workload involved with site maintenance and penalizing Flash-specific programs and projects, like online games and videos.
Google made an announcement on their official blog about the news, and it seems a bit cloudy yet as to whose technology is to credit here-
“Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.”
As you can see, Google’s already on board. Yahoo’s still working out some of the kinks, but it’s coming. This is a huge break for SEO and Apogee is excited to help our clients use this new technology to their best advantage!
