Updated Story…Flash to be searchable by Google, Yahoo!
Wow…I feel like a real news outlet. Though this news is still in the early phase, we rounded up some FAQ’s on what we have seen so far and what site owners need to be concerned about with crawlable Flash and its impact on site architecture.
Just to recap…
The announcement stated: “Adobe is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won't need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”
1 – What does this mean in basic terms?
This means that, going forward, Google and Yahoo are enabling their spiders to crawl SWF (Flash) files and pull out the text, and add that content to their search indexes. They are aiming to also index dynamic Flash content in the future.
2 – Why are the search engines able do this now?
Adobe has provided a custom Flash player to both Google and Yahoo that they can adapt to their search crawlers that will allow their spiders to crawl through SWF files in the same manner that a user would. This will expose the dynamic content and links found within the SWF file and allow them to be indexed, and potentially to appear within search results. Spiders will continue to crawl the SWF file until they think they have found all possible content within that file.
3 – So both Google and Yahoo will crawl SWF files in the same way?
The custom Flash player provided to both Google and Yahoo allows for both to access the same information. However, it is up to each search engine to determine how to incorporate this player into their spiders as well as when this change should take place. As of right now, Yahoo has yet to implement the Flash player provided by Adobe, while Google has implemented an initial basic version that will allow it to crawl static SWF files and index that static content.
4 – What about dynamically built Flash sites?
The Flash player provided to the search engines does have the ability to crawl dynamically created Flash content, including those that use XML. However, neither Google nor Yahoo has implemented this feature as of yet, nor have they detailed when this capability will be utilized. Their challenge will be how to interpret the dynamic content once they index it, and how to link directly to that content within the Flash site.
5 – What about MSN and other search engines?
Right now, Google and Yahoo are the first to work with Adobe to incorporate this custom Flash player into their search crawlers. Adobe looks to work with MSN in the future.
6 – My current site uses Flash, what do I need to do to get my SWF files indexed?
If the content you have in your Flash site is statically included in the Flash SWF, your content will be indexed. Spiders will be able to crawl all versions of Flash. If your site uses JavaScript to display the Flash in the page there is still some question as to whether or not the spiders will see the Flash.
7 – What are the limitations?
Dynamic content will be indexed by the spiders, but they will have challenges determining what that content means and where it lives in the Flash site. Now that Adobe has made the content indexable, it is up to the spiders to determine how to present the results.
In addition, spiders are still very limited in their ability to execute and crawl JavaScript, which is the way many sites embed Flash. This means that these SWF files could be skipped over if they are not embedded using the traditional <object> tag method that does not use JavaScript. This is in conflict with IE6’s requirement to include Flash using JavaScript, which prevents the ActiveX “click to interact” limitation.
8 – My site is currently built using alternate content for the Flash. What should I do?
At this time, we recommend not changing your current structure if you are presenting content through alternate means to search engines. Until we see results showing that SWF files are indeed being crawled and their content indexed appropriately by all major search engines, we will continue to recommend providing alternate content to the search engines. This can be through the use of SOFA, sIFR, SWFObject, or some other means.
9 – I am developing a new site using Flash, how should I proceed?
To ensure that you site’s content will be indexed by all search engines you will need to expose that content through an alternate HTML mechanism. It is important to ensure that you are only presenting the content that is included in the Flash so that your site isn’t seen as deceiving the user; that could potentially lead to delisting of your site. Avenue A | Razorfish’s SOFA (Search Optimized Flash Architecture) can be implemented to solve this challenge, or solutions such as sIFR and SWFObject can be components of your overall solution.