Google and Yahoo improve indexing of swf files

[daidai]

pretty important news...

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html?devcon=f1

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.

[senocular]

Another good link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

[sekasi]

I find it confusing they say that the google bot refuses to run javascript.

That basically means any SWFObject embedded flash pages won't be affected by this, no?

[senocular]

If there's no <noscript> fallback - but how is that any different from before? You were lost then (for the previous basic SWF indexing) and lost now.

At least one version of SWFObject includes the HTML inclusing making it work for this

[Anogar]

Here's the Google Blog announcement:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

[blindMelon]

That is a major step towards making full flash websites benefit because without this technology Google would have not gone deeper than the homepage if the only means for going inside the website was through that Flash navigation. Now Google can crawl the links in Flash menus and access the entire website. Awesome.. :D

[daidai]

Yes as long as the swfObject doesnt break, which I'm sure it wont as its becoming the standard in CS4, and there doesnt become problems regarding dynamic XML (which I dont yet understand if it will be a problem), then this will make designing your site with SEO a necessity.

[monotypic]

Just for clarification,
The code that gets generated by CS3 when we publish our flash files... These will or won't work with the new google indexing?

[senocular]

Just for clarification,
The code that gets generated by CS3 when we publish our flash files... These will or won't work with the new google indexing?

They should. Adobe software uses the JS approach (as of the eolas issue) as well as the HTML fallback. Google uses HTML to find a SWF embedded in a web page

[prg9]

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Wonder if its smart enough to conclude and exclude Keyword stuffing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing) & Spamdexing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing) ??

I can just imagine some SWF's are now getting loaded with Britney Spears text x 1 million instances, all kinds of spam links etc... all the same color as the background , blah, blah... JUST KIDDING ;)

But serious I wonder how it differentiates the text to avoid such tactics as was seen in HTML before they started black listing for such methods?

Just a thought.

[daidai]

hey has anyone else noticed this working? a full flash page of mine has been crawled and they indexed the text within it!

[hello21]

good news for help sites in search engine

[excogitator]

Extremely good but quite unfiltered. It seems the search engine picks up whatever textfields are there in the flash and displays them in the search results. One of my public games showed up with text such as email quit score next score lines level etc. etc. I suppose soon sites having flash might be able to exploit this vulnerability to get top rankings in search engines.

[rena]

if its true seems very good