Adobe Flash now (officially) SEO-friendly
Huge news from Adobe today - they have officially released optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo in an effort to enhance the search engine indexing of SWF files (the output file from a native Flash file, called an FLA - the SWF files are web-optimized and are what you view on a Flash-based website).
This represents a fundamental change in the way Flash-based sites are perceived in the industry. For years, Flash sites have been increasingly marginalized into sites specific to ultra-creative type portfolios, online games, digital agencies and multinational brands like Coca-cola for use in their uber-engaging ad campaigns. The everyday SMB or corporate organization were always steered away from Flash considering it was never accessible by the Search Engines, meaning that a site built in Flash was effectively invisible to the outside world.
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.
This move by Adobe is 1) clearly a way to bring Flash back into the main stream for websites, and 2) a competitive move to align Flash with Microsoft's Silverlight, who clearly did their homework and built SilverLight on XML, meaning it's instantly indexable.
It looks like Google are already on it - phasing in the SWF-indexing technology, whereas Yahoo are rumoured to 'have some work to do'. Microsoft, obviously, were not included for the competitive reasons mentioned above.
It does seem that although this is a massive step in the right direction for Flash-based sites, some issues will take a while to be resolved, for instance the production of a Flash site will have to change in an SEO standards compliance-type way and be built in such a way to allow deep indexing of separate SWF files. Having fiddled with Flash before, it's easy to build a site as one complete movie/FLA, and in this case a user might be left at your homepage after arriving from a deep search, and be expected to navigate themselves to the correct level/page.
Except for the learning curve needed for webmasters and web designers in Flash, this advancement by Adobe might be monumental. Flash exists on 98% of all computers today, and there are 73 million Flash files on the web.
July 1st, 2008