March 17, 2009

Adobe Launches SEO Technology Center for Flash

In the not-so-distant past, sites built using Adobe's Flash technology were invisible to search engines. Both search engines and SEOs have continued to work on ways to make those pages show up better in search results. Last summer, Adobe lent a hand, by providing its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo to help them figure out how to better index sites and pages created with Flash.

This week, Adobe went a step further, launching a new SEO Technology Center for Flash to help developers and other content creators build Flash applications in more search-friendly ways. The site, part of the Adobe Developer Connection, explains current SEO challenges and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices to overcome them.

Although the search engines are currently working on improving their indexing of Flash content, Adobe advises that at this point, it's still best to offer them an HTML representation of the content. They explain that this could be done via hidden DIV tags, which they admit is considered to be hidden text by some, and may get you banned by Google if you're not showing the same content there as you are in the Flash file. They suggest using the NOSCRIPT tag, since Flash files are called via JavaScript, and the search engines don't use JavaScript in their crawlers.

Adobe advises setting up separate HTML pages for each important topic area of your site, and deep-linking to the proper area of the SWF file from each of those pages. That's a best practice for non-Flash SEO as well, since a page that focuses more on a given topic is likely to rank better for keywords around that topic, while a page with six or seven topics is not likely to rank well for any of them.

There's lots more great content on the new SEO Technology Center for Flash, so if you've got a site that uses Flash, or are considering building one, you should definitely take the time to read as much as you can about it before moving forward.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

July 2, 2008

SEW Experts: Avoid Getting Coding Problems Flagged by Search Engines

Some common SEO and Web development practices can be used quite legitimately, yet still could look like spam to search engines. In today's Web Analytics and ROI column, "Coding Problems: How to Avoid Getting Flagged by Search Engines," Eric Enge explains that the key is to use these techniques for legitimate reasons, use them in moderation, and in ways commonly found on the Web.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 1, 2008

Adobe Provides Flash Technology to Google and Yahoo for Better Indexing

For years SEOs have been about the inability of search engines to crawl flash pages. But now Adobe is making an effort to keep Flash in the web development toolbox. They've announced the provision of Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to facilitate the indexing of sites and pages created with Flash.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, an FAQ was posted offering up more details about the update. Here are some highlights:

Google will now be able to better crawl the text content of SWF files. The content includes buttons, menus, self-contained websites developed in Flash and "everything in between."
Google can use the text it crawls to provide a descriptive "snippet" for its search results.
Links included in Flash content will also be crawled.
If your Flash file is loaded by JavaScript, Google won't be able to read it
If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file, Google will index that separately from the original Flash file.

Google says it can't crawl images, videos or FLV files because they do not contain text content.

What do you think about search engines crawling Flash? Are you more inclined to use Flash on your sites now? Leave your reaction in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 9, 2007

Google Webmaster Blog Talks About Flash

Mark Berghausen of Google offered up a post last week on the Google Webmaster Central blog about the Best Uses of Flash. In it, Mark points out that Google can read the content of Flash files, but not all forms of Flash. The post provides some helpful suggestions about smart ways to use Flash as part of your web design.

My observation is that Flash is a movie. Even if Google is able to read the text in your movie, you don't decide to build a movie and then create text rich pages. The only movie I ever saw that had a lot of on screen text was Star Wars, and that was only the first minute or so of the movie. I would bet that a very small percentage of Star Wars viewers read that text in detail.

The point is that once you have decided to make a movie out of your site, you have already moved away from the premise of a search engine friendly site. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but just don't expect to get much search traffic after you put it up.

Along those lines, Mark does clearly outline some ways to integrate Flash into your site so that it's a component of the site, as opposed to it being the whole site. The suggestions make a lot of sense, and can help you if you really want to have the strong visual appeal that Flash can offer on your site.

Posted by at 9:00 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2007

SEW Experts: Flash: The Pink Elephant or the Spark

In today's Outsourced column, "Flash: The Pink Elephant or the Spark," Chris Boggs goes over the history of epic battles between designers and SEOs over Flash. To make your life easier, he provides you with one of the latest technologies for dealing with Flash issues.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:01 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2007

Flash and HTML Text Copies = Duplicate Content?

There is a thread going in Google Groups about Flash and Getting Indexed. This discussion focuses on techniques for providing search engines an HTML text file to chew on instead of trying to parse the flash itself.

Deepa was concerned that this might be seen as a spammy duplicate content technique by the search engines. The consensus in the discussion was that this was in fact good behavior, provided that the text content matches up with the content of the flash.

Of course, the trick part is that it's not completely natural for the text content to line up exactly with the content of a movie. They are different mediums that benefit from different treatment. So there is going to be some variance in the content due to that simple fact.

Perhaps the thing to do, if you insist on having Flash on your site, is to write an HTML page about the same topic as the Flash, and target that page at users who do not have the ability to view Flash. Write the page as if you were trying to accomplish the exact same things as you are doing with the movie.

The words may differ some, but the intent would be exactly the same.

Posted by at 1:56 PM | Permalink

April 12, 2006

Some SEO Resources For Flash Sites

Flash and multimedia content has always presented SEOs a challenge when it comes to ranking that content and those pages in search engines. Garrett French discovered a post by Natasha Robinson who decided to take on the challenge of working on a framed-flash site for a client and making it rank well. In her post she documented several SEO flash resources worth checking out.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:38 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

Designers Should Love SEO, Plus Making Flash Friendly To Search Engines

Can't We All Just Get Along? - The Battle Between SEOs and Web Designers has David Wallace at Search Engine Guide inspired by the Do Designers Hate SEO? discussion at our Search Engine Watch Forums. In that thread, many feel designers should embrace lots of what SEO has to offer, especially since it is NOT all about blog spamming nor necessarily dumbing down design. David touches on this and dives deeper into issues with Flash and how Flash designers, with some thought, can have Flash and search engine friendliness combined. Our Revisting How Search Engines Deal With Flash thread at the SEW Forums goes into even more depth here, with lots of great advice for those of you grappling with the Flash "problem" for search engines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:27 AM | Permalink

October 21, 2005

Seeing Flash The Search Engine Way

Phil Bradley points to this site designed to help you understand how search engines view your Flash content.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:41 PM | Permalink

February 9, 2005

Search Engine Tools Network Offers Free SEO Utilities

Olivier Andriew, editor of the well-known Abondance site that covers the French search space and search engines in general, in the French language, has launched a new Search Engine Tools Network offering some free optimization utilities ranging from rank checking to page analysis.

I've never been a big fan of page analysis tools, feeling they lead people into seeking a "perfect page" solution that doesn't exist (my older In Pursuit Of The Perfect Page for SEW members explains more). But other tools that caught my eye were:

SE-Bid: Pretty cool at bringing back the paid listing for a term from FindWhat, Google and Overture side-by-side.

SE-Spider: Designed to simulate what a search engine might see and extract from your pages, when it visits them. The caveat here is that everything shown might not be indexed by particular search engine, such as meta keyword data, ALT text and so on.

SE-Flash: Tries to show you what search engines may extract from Flash files, though I don't think this should be taken as a guarantee of exact indexing. Some info on what is suspected to be indexed is here. Also see this further reading:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:04 AM | Permalink

October 11, 2004

Overcoming The Flash Challenge With Search Engines

Shari Thurow provides some strategies on dealing with Flash and search engine friendliness in ClickZ: Get Flash Sites Ranked in Search Engines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions

Privacy Policy
Affiliates

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>

Top Jobs

more Jobs