Abe. I think I have something you’re going to love…

Jul 01

Ok, so this is probably something that Erin would normally drop the ball on, but I couldn’t help myself. I think it could make a pretty big impact on how we approach design and development for our clients.And now, without further delay…

Adobe, Google and Yahoo join to make Flash content searchable!!

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist put it…
“So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Read more here: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/Adobe-Teams-with-Google-Yahoo-for-Flash-Search/

And here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

So, I’m curious… Erin, what’s your take??

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Cathy Sherwood, Multimedia News, Search Engine Optimization

4 Comments

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  1. Erin
    Jul 01 at 10:32

    Well I have 3 comments actually:
    1) I can’t wait to spam Abe’s swf files.
    2) It’s about time. One more point for SEO!!! :)
    3) “Google has integrated it and Yahoo will in a period of time.” Hahahahaha. Yahoo will integrate it when they stop losing all of their employees.

    Seriously though, if Google has integrated it now we should start testing it to see if it actually works. I propose creating a simple flash site that is optimized (only in the swf file) for some very obscure keyword phrases. Phrases like “James is a tag cloud hater” and “Abe’s flash is ghettofabulous” and “Matthew has a pet Shmoo”

    Then, about a month from now, we can start testing to see if it ranks in Google for those obscure phrases. If it doesn’t, then I won’t be a believer…

  2. Cathy
    Jul 01 at 12:03

    Oooh I love that idea! Probably wouldn’t take too much to do and would be a great case study for our blog.

  3. Abe
    Jul 02 at 15:44

    This is excellent. And Erin, I think your idea of testing it is also excellent. Might be worth putting some obscure phrases in there in different ways, so that we can test which ways get ‘seen’ by the spider: timeline buttons vs. buttons that are attached via actionscript, links that are triggered by something other than mouse-events (keypresses, for example), links that are loaded in via external data such as xml, etc.

    Also, I wonder what url gets indexed, and when? If we implement address-bar re-writes via swfaddress, will the spider grab the re-written URL so that it can actually deep-link straight into a sub-page of the flash movie?

    Let the gaming of the system begin (again)!

  4. Erin
    Jul 03 at 10:47

    Ok, the person at Bruce Clay who posted this article is totally a flash-hater, so Abe you may want to ignore most of this article. Or maybe we can create our new flash website as a game where you can zap Lisa Barone with Flash guns and then feed her to Googlebot.

    http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/07/dont_build_your_site_in_flash.html

    But there is one part of this article worth noting for our test site:
    “Google did note, however, that the crawler will not execute any type of JavaScript, so if your page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, you’re still out of luck.”

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