Crawlers may miss things inside SWF

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8 commentsThursday, July 17, 2008

No Indexing Guarantee From Google Flash Crawls

Crawlers may miss things inside SWF

8 Comments

By SEO Company (WPN reader) - Fri, 11/21/2008 - 23:06

Standardization of Indexing

The days of Google not being able to index multi media should have been over years ago. With the technology they have and massive arsenal of funds, it is difficult to believe that they themselves could not have put together a new format of multimedia that is indexable.

By Pittsburgh SEO (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 09:44

Flash is Ify

I've had flash sites before that have some text on the page as well for non-flash browsers and such. And sometimes just few paragraphs after the main flash on the page. These have all worked out well in the search engines in the past for me. I think you still need to have some text on the page in order to give Google and the other engines something to think with but I think Google is getting very close to wrapping up the flash indexing stuff.

Adobe offers a downloadable tool that you can see the content that can be extracted which is the same tool Google is using for extracting text/html from flash. I've used the tool to take a peak at what some of my flash sites look like and it's pretty useful.

By seo questions (WPN reader) - Wed, 08/06/2008 - 06:58

hmmm

I am very curious to see how this is going to play out. I think it might end up backfiring in the long run for both google and flash sites.

By Tanzanite (WPN reader) - Fri, 08/01/2008 - 02:09

Need to Be Very Accurate

I think the indexing ability of Google to be able to pull out that information in an accurate way, without being succeptible to spam techniques, will dictate how quickly webmasters and business decide to move in the direction of offering move flash again.

By challenge (WPN reader) - Tue, 07/22/2008 - 21:32

too early wait and see

I think it is currently a wait-see-and-test situation , it appears way too early to expect a lot from this process, google started crawling forms too, a few months ago, no much has come of that so far .

By Ryan (WPN reader) - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 14:58

Its still better than before

Personally, I will always make html and php websites over full flash websites because flash will never be as SEO compatible as html. Now that SEO has become such a booming industry, you really need to take advantage of every SEO tactic that you can in order to stay ahead of your competition.

With that being said, I still am glad that they are at least making progress on making flash content readable. Flash has never been very SEO compatible at all but at least it is starting to head that way. It may not be advantageous to make full flash websites but at least now you can create cool animated flash menus to drop into your html site and Google and Yahoo will be able to follow the links. The only sacrifice you make is possible extended loading time and a few extra lines of code; for some websites, I'm OK with that.

By Green (WPN reader) - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 14:35

I would jump the gun and say

I would jump the gun and say Flash is now ok in googles eyes. Nothing is crawlable like good old text.

By business networking (WPN reader) - Thu, 07/17/2008 - 14:17

I wouldn't trust it. I had

I wouldn't trust it. I had javascript on my landing page and they had a difficult time reading that and yahoo and msn wouldn't read it at all. Once I removed that they indexed very quickly. Putting flash seems like you are asking for problems.