How to SEO Flash » by Jonathan Hochman. By Jonathan Hochman See also: How to SEO a Website Flash gets a bad rap, undeserved in my opinion, for harming search engine visibility. Why are search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners concerned about Flash, and how can we SEO Flash content? Flash content is often heavy on images and interactive features, and light on text. The leading search engines are heavily dependant on text to understand the meaning of pages. The leading web development tool, Adobe Dreamweaver, embeds Flash in web pages with code that fails to provide accessibility for visitors or search spiders who cannot handle Flash. With the rising popularity of iOS mobile devices from Apple, including iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, Flash SEO programming is even more essential. The April 11, 2006 release of Microsoft's popular Internet Explorer (IE) browser included an update ("Eolas") that prevents ActiveX-based Flash controls from working properly.
Beu blog » Blog Archive » 2009 Google Flash SEO. In case you missed their recent announcement about Flash, Google and Adobe have teamed up on a new algorithm to index text content in Flash. As a result of the new algorithm for Flash, Googlebot now indexes "textual content in SWF files of all kinds" and extracts URLs embeded in Flash. " On July 1, 2008, Google rolled out another update designed to assist Googlebot in its ability to traverse simple JavaScript, like SWFObject. While the full impact is not yet known, these technologies will redefine how Flash sites are created, constructed, designed and, as a result, optimized. Before discussing the results of my case studies and how to optimize an actual scenario Flash site, it's important to understand some crucial background information. Prior to the introduction of Google's Flash algorithm, Googlebot crawled only (X)HTML architectures without executing JavaScript to access text content and/or URLs in Flash.
Googlebot Flash Update Case Studies Google Flash Update Case Study #1: Result: Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines. It’s my second most hated site to optimize: Flash. For an SEO, Flash websites list right up there with Javascript sites, which is my first nemesis. More and more of my clients are having their sites done in flash, then handing me the site, and saying, “Now, turn water into wine, please; and make it a Chardonnay…” So instead of moaning, complaining, wheedling and whining, I’ve found other things to do instead. The first time I optimized a Flash site, it was a disaster. But since then, I’ve learned some very effective ways to optimize a Flash site. What seemed miraculous in the beginning isn’t as daunting a task as it needs to be. While I still hate to optimize flash, and I question the wisdom of doing so, there is no getting around it these days. Flash does provide a great user experience, and can definitely increase sales.
As an SEO, you understand the importance of search engine rankings, and the best methods on achieving positioning. So how do you accomplish all that? Other Flash Tips: Flash SEO Test Page. Back |McAnerin Networks Inc. > Resources > SEO Articles > Flash and SEO by Ian McAnerin2004, Rev. 2007 * This is a much updated version of an old Flash Test Page - which I've kept because the tests are still useful. The problem(s) with Flash I'll start with a basic statement - Flash is not search engine friendly. Here is a fictionalized but essentially accurate conversation about Flash being indexed by the search engines: The bottom line is, that if you think about how the typical Flash file is set up, the first bunch of frames usually just say "Loading" and "1%" 2%" etc.
In short, a search engine may have to use up several megabytes of file just to get to the part of the Flash movie that contains text, only to find out it's a program, script or vectorized text, rather than what it would consider to be content. This is hugely inefficient, a waste of bandwidth, and apparently several studies by the search engines have shown that it's simply not worth it. So yes, it's possible. A Flash Movie. How do Flash Sites Rank Well?