Uncloaking ‘invisible’ Flash Web content
Adobe announced June 30, 2008 that it was providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help them better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications that include the Shockwave Flash file (SWF) format.
Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with optimized Adobe Flash Player technology so search engine spiders will be able to find and index SWF content, including Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.
When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized Flash player on the search engine server. Search engine companies have developed an algorithm indexes Flash files just as someone who interacts with the site.
The text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used when Google generates a snippet that appears below the URL on the search results page. The words that appear in the Flash files can now be used to match query terms in Google searches.
Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance.
More than 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops have Flash Player installed and Flash is hugely popular. Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links within SWF files, but most content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect flash files.Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player says “Now, you are losing all the context of what content was near each other and running at the same time,” The difference is like reading the index of a book vs. reading the contents of the book.
Click for more information:
1 Comment
October 30, 2008 at 5:00 am
[...] – bookmarked by 2 members originally found by douggeivett on 2008-10-18 Flash and SEO http://marketingsmb.wordpress.com/?p=8 – bookmarked by 4 members originally found by iyoung2 on [...]