Google Sees Flash. So What? - More Evolution Than Revolution
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This move sounds like less of a giant leap and more of a natural step forward when you consider that the search engines (especially Google) have been trying to index rich content for some time. Vanessa Fox, writing for Search Engine Land, noted that Google has been able to extract some text and links from Flash files for a while now. Adobe's technological help makes the process “less error prone.”
Perhaps the most significant change for Flash files won't be in becoming visible so much as becoming a little more understandable to searchers. Fox observed that improvements in the snippets displayed under search results describing the files might be the most noticeable difference. “Before, Google often couldn't extract any content from a Flash file, so the description for a Flash page was often either empty or would consist of the only text available for the file, such as the Flash version or the word 'loading,'” she stated.
So how does this change SEO? Fox advises that you implement Flash in such a way that a unique URL is provided for each set of content. Since Google can follow interactions with Flash (to a limited degree), it might load a particular URL as relevant to a certain query, when the actual item that is relevant is deeper in the SWF file – so when the searcher clicks that link, “the content won't be found on the page. The searcher will have to interact with the application until that content is loaded. Searchers may instead feel frustrated and abandon the page,” Fox explained.
The other way this changes SEO is that you may now have to fight designers and clients who insist that, since Google can now read Flash, it's reasonable to build lots of Flash into a website, or even go whole hog with an all-Flash video site. They will probably be dismayed when they learn the reality; in some ways, things have gotten more difficult, since you can't tell quite as easily what is and is not indexed. Google won't show you the file they crawled.
John Andrews, writing in his blog Competitive Webmastering & SEO, notes that “SEO for Flash just got more expensive, because it got more sophisticated...Where SEO for Flash used to be limited to a reasonable set of success metrics, we now have an opportunity to help Google much more as it seeks to understand what the Flash content means for the user.” Interestingly, his suggestion is that “The first thing smart SEOs need to do now is block Google from indexing Flash, simply because we don't control Google's interpretation of the meaning of Flash content. I don't think that is what Adobe intended.” Indeed.
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