In June this year, Adobe and Google announced that Google would be reading and indexing Flash content. For years, Flash was shunned by SEO’s as it just wasn’t indexable (is that a word?). I can imagine that accessibility officianados have a healthy problem with flash as well. Flash as a single element to a site is a nice visual representation of content. 100% flash sites tend to be large, have little-no accessibility and force you to view the site one way and one way only..
Adobe provided Yahoo and Google (no Microsoft?) with some tech to enable the search engines to read and index swf files. Perhaps the lack of a Microsoft seat at the table was related to Microsofts (IMHO) vain attempt at replacing Flash with their own similar technology which in short, fell on it’s ass.
It is now in full swing, although they all have some more work to do in order to achieve a 100% readable and indexed set of Flash files. So what does it mean? There is a bunch of stuff which can’t currently be seen by the search engines, the idea so far is to index text content from within Flash files. That’s great, although if much of the flash content is text - I would rather that people just used markup?!
So, images, video files and anything else you have built within Flash is unlikely to be seen and indexed - sorry! Equally, if you speak a western language, your text will be indexed fine, but if you speak Hebrew or Arabic then unfortunately - Google says sorry again!
It will be interesting to see how this relationship with Adobe evolves and what this means for previously un-indexed content. Google are obviously attempting to increase what it can index, this isn’t always a good thing. I guess Adobe has little choice given the renewed focus on SEO and accessibility, they need to do what they can to keep Flash alive.
August 10th, 2008 at 9:14 am
This is interesting indeed. I have no idea how Google will manage something like this but I do know it will not be easy. We could be entering into a completely new era of SEO. I for one will watch this development with interest.
From an accessibility point of view this might be good news. If they can manage to get this stuff accessible for the bots, the screen readers might be next, who knows?
August 10th, 2008 at 11:54 am
That’s a very good point and one I didn’t consider. I was thinking from the point of view that screenreaders are fairly stagnant in their development but actually it might give them a hook-in for improving the offerring. If google offer an API for it then it could lead the way…
August 11th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Being able to read something and making sense of it are two different things. As most of flash is still pretty much image based I don’t see this having much of an impact at this time. But who knows what this may bring in the future.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Too true, although it does say that they are looking to index the text from Flash. As the text is input into Flash in a standard format - it’s just the fonts and tweening etc that change it, perhaps this is where the information comes from.
I agree, I think that a far lower %age of Flash content is text compared to images, my personal preference would be to see Flash disappear - I really dislike it. People do use it and to make it more SEF and potentially a hook-in for screen readers gets my vote.
Thanks for the comment.