July 1st, 2008
Search-ability in Flash
Last night Adobe announced that we’ve given a special version of the Flash Player to Google and Yahoo that will more accurately let them crawl through Flash content. Even though Google has been indexing .SWF files for a while and even been able to pull out some text, they haven’t really been able to send their spiders through an application and pull out links and context. Flash applications are dynamic in nature, so having the special player means that Google will be able to pull out more relevant information than it could before. But in our community there seems to be a lot of concern and questions about how this is going to work.
As I see it, not a whole lot changes for the Flash world over night. I think this puts Flash more on par with HTML and Ajax applications when it comes to search engine optimization. We still have a lot of basic issues with how searching an application even works. How do SEO Microsoft Word or Photoshop? This doesn’t address those issues and it is by no means a silver bullet for RIAs and search engines. What it does do is start to expose a ton of the data inside of Flash applications that just wasn’t accessible before. Kevin Merrit of blist had a great example. They use deep linking in their Flash application to let you dive into a specific blist. Now, in theory, Google can index the content of that blist as well as the fact that it has a unique URL associated with it. That wasn’t possible before.
Show me the money
From an Adobe side, it sucks not to be able to tell our community more about what’s going to happen or how things will get indexed. But we just don’t know. We’ve simply given Google a better look into Flash movies and they’ll decide how that plays into their algorithm. There’s so much energy and time going into figuring out the secrets of SEO and now the Flash community has a horse in that game. Smart, entrepreneurial people are going to quickly figure out what exactly is being indexed by Google and what the best ways to expose Flash content to the search engines are. It happened with HTML and it now, finally, it can happen with Flash. But my hope is that this will help tie RIAs and Flash/Flex applications into the wider ecosystem of what Google does. Could we see AdSense for Flex apps? What about Google Analytics? As Google gets better at crawling Flash movies and we start to understand more what’s going on, developers should be able to expose content in the right way and tie into some of those advertising services.
Where’s Microsoft?
The one thing that I was disappointed in was that we didn’t offer this special player to more people. I get the sense that there was some work on both sides that had to go on to really fit the special Flash Player into the search ecosystem. The Register said we had discussions with the Live Search team but that they’re not currently active. I’m not sure of the state of things but I’m in the process of finding out. It would be great if this was open and anyone could use it. That’s been the direction Adobe has been going so hopefully it turns out that way soon.
In general, I think this is a big milestone for Flash and RIAs. It’s kind of confusing, kind of hard to wrap your head around, but developers are smart people, and there’s too much money at stake not to figure it out. I think what will happen is that over the next 6 months people will figure out exactly what is being indexed and how it affects search engine rankings. Then we can all start to create some best practices around SEO and Flash. Then I’m sure Google will change the algorithm again and we take a few steps back before moving forward. In the end, that’s what’s good about this. Flash can now play the same SEO game as HTML and all that it entails.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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