Google Can Now Crawl Flash Files
Not everybody is a fan of websites that feature a lot of Adobe Flash (count me among those), and from an SEO standpoint, Google’s inability to crawl Flash files made it easy to recommend website developers to refrain from using a lot of Flash, especially to display relevant content.
But not so fast. In a move to counter the more simple crawlability of Microsoft’s xml-based Silverlight, Adobe has developed a Flash player for the search engines that crawls through SWF files and pulls out relevant text and links and translates it into something search engines can work with. Javascript and text embedded in images are still a problem, however.
There some caveats, namely that Google will not be able to show a cached representation of the text being crawled like they can in html-based sites. Also, accessing the Flash content that is crawled could be a bit of a pain since users may have to wait out a lot of non-relevant content in the Flash movie to find what they really want.
But sites already featuring a lot of Flash will welcome the added content this will bring to the search engines. VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha notes that Flash-heavy sites like Tiffany & Co. will be loving life today knowing that a ton of their content is now crawlable.
Google is ahead of the curve here, with Yahoo a little behind. Microsoft Live Search isn’t in on the party, and it’s not known whether this is Microsoft’s choice or if Adobe is stiffing Microsoft since Silverlight is in direction competition with Flash.
So will this lead to a big explosion in Flash development? Most most sites, let’s hope not, but for certain sites where a lot of rich content is necessary (movie sites, for example), it’s great news.
Technorati Tags: google, adobe, flash, seo
