Flash For Search Engines

It is one of the maxims of search engine optimisation: if you’ve put it in Flash it might look good but you’ve pretty much hidden it from search engines.

But maybe the maxim doesn’t apply any more.

Google, Yahoo! and Adobe have got together to figure out a way to offer the big name search engines access to content in Flash file formats (SWF). According to Ecommerce Times:

“The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe’s Flash Player technology to improve their engines’ abilities to index the Flash file format (SWF) and scan information contained within the files.

This, according to Adobe, will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content powered by Adobe Flash Player and which would otherwise remain outside the scope of traditional Web searches.”

There are already some things you can do to get content in Flash indexed. Things like, most basically, “noscript” content and ensuring that SWF file meta data is keyword rich. This, though, is an interesting development.

A kinda “duh” development, though. S’pose Adobe weren’t too concerned that Flash movies couldn’t be found via the way people find things online, search engines. That didn’t stop Flash being popular with advertising creatives, gamers, etc. or widely used. But taking 12 years to take some steps to cater to search engines…

Indeed, its not clear who approached who. Maybe the impetus came for the search engines’ endless quest to deliver good results. That definitely the feeling I’m getting from what Google has said on its Webmaster Central Blog and Googleblog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t be rushing to redo your navigation in your site in Flash. It will be a long time before “no flash please if you’re looking to get traffic via search engines” drops out of SEO-client conversation. Best bet is still href text links — modify it all you like via css but offer the simple links.

After thought: Will be interesting to see what impact this has. The heavily designed sort of sites that make use of flash aren’t generally put together in a keyword savvy way either. (Think of big brand sites put together by big ad agencies — Adidas isn’t to worried about using running shoes a lot in website content, for instance.)

The question is whether the text content in Flash files will actually help search engines understand what the content is about.