We need your brain
Please, feel free to share your experience with us about Google, Yahoo and MSN crawling of Adobe Flash websites.
Current list of experiment that we are running:
- How Google index text embedded in Adobe Flash?
- Does Google follow links embedded in Adobe Flash?
- Can Google index external content loaded in Adobe Flash?
- Can Google index imported swf files?
- Can Google index Flash created with JavaScript Object?
If you have idea about new experiments please write them bellow.
October 11th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Hi, Nice site.
We did a Flash experiment in July and found links are indexed when in Flash - you can read about it here
http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/flash-time-to-c.html
Speak to Teddie or Gary about it if interested in collaboration
October 30th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Hey Guys
I’m a big fan of this stuff.
I just did the Flash for the latest Mt Franklin campaign. I usually write a development study after most feature projects. This is it: http://www.neilnand.com/index.php/development/mt-franklin-well-of-positivity/
This is an abstract of it:
The topic of Flash SEO has been floating around for a while now, and Google is able to seep inside the Flash and index the content. Although this doesn’t help our situation as Google can’t seep into Flash’s dynamic content.
The manual way of providing SEO content to Google for a Flash website is putting the content behind the Flash interface, in the non-Flash area. The problem with this is, it will always be the same content over and over, even though you have a comprehensive content heavy website.
Given our ingredients; dynamic content and deeplinking of dynamic content; we can filter search optimised content in the non-Flash area to the specific URL. Now with deeplinking, we can point Flash to specific sections within the site, when the website is initially loaded. In the non-Flash content we can have specially formatted internal links that will provide Google with the section relevant content and allow users to see the specific content in the Flash.
Thanks
Neil
November 1st, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Dear Sir
first of all we all know that google.com use meta tag and keywords and also capture same keywords and and rating than shows and msn and yahoo bit same
if adobe give us option of a layer in which we can put text hidden that that can not show in our animation but that text show in source code than we can boost
seo of flash pages this is my opinion
in this way we can get 50% to up result
hope u don’t laugh at me
take care
arfanshams
November 18th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I’ve just posted an article regarding my “off-canvas” content.
Read it here: http://www.webturd.com/content/view/166/68/
If you would like to repost, contact me through that site.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Test getting external data from a amf server, you can use the free phpAMF.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Hi Guys,
As an SEO with a concentration on the photography industry, the crawlability of Flash is of great concern to me. I’m interested in providing anything I can for experiments, examples and data.
Cheers!
Levi
@trontastic
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm
About 1 yr ago we developed a seo friendly flash solution that we implemented utilizing XHTML, CSS, and a splash of JavaScript. Basically the flash is fed via an xhtml file and then the contents of the file are output in a div positioned off the view port, end result is indexable content that is printer friendly and screen reader friendly. If js or flash is not available they get a solid xhtml/css fallback that looks exactly the same with less functionality of course. It works pretty well when you have the time to implement it correctly.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:36 am
Interesting to see that you have found Google is now indexing SWF files embedded using JavaScript. I’m very interested in learning more about how alternative content is valued compared to what is found in the SWF (assuming the content is the same).
March 25th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I have been using a technique to embed flash using FlashObject/JavaScript for the last couple of years. This method affords space on the webpage for alternative content which is hidden from the site visitor as long as the browser has flash player. I have had a jump from PR1 to PR3 when I re-embedded some older sites using this method. You can read about it on the Kirupa forum, search for fixing the flash embed issue, the article is a response to the IE embed issue that surface a couple of years back
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:10 pm
I have to say that one time I was making experiments, and in one site I got a google result link to a swf and the links to CACHE! and realted pages, unfortunately that web is no longer available and I didn’t take at least one printscreen. But I have the swf file that I used and I’ll make experiments again
May 13th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Last November I had the opportunity to attend Adobe MAX. While there, I attended a session detailing what Adobe is doing to help the indexability of dynamic SWF content. It was really interesting… and kind of funny. They provided Google and Yahoo! a specialized Flash player that doesn’t actually display any graphics and runs 10,000 times the speed of a normal Flash Player. Basically, it returns all the MovieClips, Buttons and Text it finds throughout the SWF. When it finds a button, it “clicks” on it and waits to see what happens. If it encounters text. It indexes it. If it finds another MovieClip, it dives into to to find more Buttons, Text and MovieClips. If sees that it’s loading an XML, it waits then indexes any text found in the XML and which can be visibly seen by a user. It continues through the entire application until there is no more clips to find. Basically Google created an AI for Flash indexing.
What’s really interesting, is that they also took special care to not index the things a user can’t see. Just to improve search results. For instance, if the text is invisible, or it’s alpha is set to completely transparent, or the text is in a position off the stage that wouldn’t be visible to a user, it is not indexed. So if you do not want your text indexed by Google. You should make sure the text is not visible to your user. Alternatively, if you do not want to have your swf indexed at all, you can add that to your robots.txt file.
Admittedly, Adobe said they have no frickin clue what Google is doing with their player. They can only speculate, because Adobe had to build their own indexing AI to test the player themselves. Google will not share their AI’s source code with Adobe. And Adobe admitted that theirs is far more complex. They do know, however, Google is further along than Yahoo!.Because not even Adobe is privy to how far Google has indexed SWFs. With about 60 billion SWFs running on the web to date, they said it would take a while to index all the swf files too.
You can check out the video here!
http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15384v1000
November 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm
This is site is a really great asset - thanks a ton!
Two other experiments that come to mind:
1) What if a proprietary javascript library is used to embed the flash, much like swfObject? This becomes an issue when utilizing flash on huge enterprise sites which don’t allow 3′rd party JS libraries to be used. This test would also let us know if the engines are just written to specifically “understand” swfObject.
2) What if the swfObject code to attach a movie is in an external JS file instead of inline, does the swf get indexed then?