tag:www.insideria.com,2009://34/tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728- 2009-11-05T20:26:15Z Comments for Google's Indexing Flash Text with Adobe's SDK (http://www.insideria.com/2008/01/googles-probably-indexing-flas.html) Movable Type 4.21-en tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728 2008-01-18T23:51:19Z 2008-08-12T17:45:43Z Google's Indexing Flash Text with Adobe's SDK I just caught this very exciting bit of information regarding Flash in Google searches. Google's indexing Flash text content using Adobe's Search Engine SDK. This is according to an interview Stephen Spencer conducted with Matt Cutts from Google. I haven't found this on any official Google page, but it is more or less from the horses mouth. Andre Charland http://www.nitobi.com I just caught this very exciting bit of information regarding Flash in Google searches. Google's indexing Flash text content using Adobe's Search Engine SDK. This is according to an interview Stephen Spencer conducted with Matt Cutts from Google. I haven't found this on any official Google page, but it is more or less from the horses mouth. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

"...it can be difficult to pull the text out a Flash file. I think we do pretty well. It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers."

This is great news for RIAs and especially Flash/Flex folks who care about search engine ranking. It was always at least a little bit contested if not unclear how and if text and in Flash sites (.swf) got proper treatment from Google. Certainly this has been stated as reason to not adopt Flash for your presentation layer in the past, maybe this will change people's minds a bit. Flex has done a lot to combat two of the other big RIA risk ares of accessibility and bookmarking/back button issues. I'm glad to see real issues like this being resolved with concrete technical solutions. More on accessibility and bookmarking (state) in future posts:)

This is also good because we can avoid techniques that could look like cloaking to Googlebot which will hurt your search engine listings. It is pretty cool that you can download the SDK and test out your content. However on the SDK's FAQ page (which looks a bit dated) it says that Adobe hasn't announced any official 3rd party search engines.

You download the interview in mp3 format or read the transcript for more info.

]]> tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2014295 Comment from John Dowdell on 2008-01-21 John Dowdell http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd More context here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2008/01/google_swf_sdk.cfm

jd/adobe

]]> 2008-01-21T17:15:54Z tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2014297 Comment from Andre Charland on 2008-01-21 Andre Charland http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre Hi John,

Just read your post on the topic. I completely understand that there are many other factors that play into having a popular and high traffic site. However, I think it's still very relevant that you can see the content of your Flash site exactly the way Google does. At very least it will really help SEO practitioners understand what content is being indexed, and help them sleep easier:)

You mention "Incidental bodytext might be useful in some advanced and specific searches" and that's bang on!! Search engine marketers spend a lot of time worrying about avdanced and very specific searches, that's where the elusive "long tail" comes from.

Thanks!

]]> 2008-01-21T17:40:40Z tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2015283 Comment from Dave_Matthews on 2008-02-18 Dave_Matthews http://www.2GoTo.com Don't remember where it was posted, but there is a serious problem with DIV layers holding transparent Flash - Google considers it cloaking/spam.

]]> 2008-02-18T11:33:04Z tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2015827 Comment from Glasgow Web Design on 2008-03-12 Glasgow Web Design http://www.intraspin.com John, I very much agree - Google has been able to read Flash for a long time, but still Flash quite clearly doesn't perform as well as HTML. This is because you gain none of the benefit of tags with greater emphasis, i.e. headers (), bold (), etc.

Andre, you're also correct, flash is indexed, and so the long tail comes into play, but if you can acheive your objectives with Javascript, why lose the benefit of HTML?

]]> 2008-03-12T19:18:49Z tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2017002 Comment from Andrea Hill on 2008-05-08 Andrea Hill http://www.afhill.com/blog Dave_Matthews -- you should probably find the reference for that, without evident thereof, it may just be a supposition :)

]]> 2008-05-08T11:35:13Z tag:www.insideria.com,2008://34.22728-comment:2017730 Comment from Miracle studios on 2008-06-11 Miracle studios http://www.miraclestudios.in Great tool to make my flash indexable

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