Adobe becomes SEO friendly?
Big news today as Adobe helps ‘reveal’ Shock Wave Flash sites. While, flash was previously only indexable through text links based within its code, it remained for the most part invisible to search engine spiders. Relax Graphic SEO will be doing heavy research into this new feature added by Macro Media. Until, then I would like to pop everyones bubble for the time being though.
So, Adobe Flash is now being released with updates that allow for the content presented by websites that host applications & entire sites in nothing, but, flash to be easily indexed. The only problem still remains & unseen is the question of: when. I don’t think this would be an immediate response from the search engines , if only because they will need to update the algorithm. Not, that the companies haven’t been talking to one another, thus, a even quicker response to this technology is possible.
Let’s go over the major three quickly, MSN, GOOGLE, YAHOO!. All but one of these search engines have made a news article about the technology & even the speculation in this area is a little fuzzy.
Google has stated:
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In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.
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Now, I just don’t believe that this algorithm has reached any sort of maturity, thus, these results in my opinion will not yield what webmasters have dreamed of for a long time. Just like the regular GoogleBot, it gets revamped and improved. Thus, I think this new algorithm will take some time for webmasters to really notice what is going on, what will be seen as a black hat tactic s, what will be allowed. So, right now until more dirt is uncovered about the algorithm & what tricks work we are facing a new & exciting time to be in SEO. Whom, will be the first to uncover some tips, the tricks & write the book, which one of these will yield good results? Same, goes for Yahoo!.
MSN seems to be the beaten step child in the matter, for they are awkwardly silent on the release of this information, even though they have been able to integrate mobile flash. Like others have speculated they may not even care, if only because of Silverlight. Which, is great if only due to its semi-open source nature. Not, that one can’t find data on Flash & other Adobe products, but, we all know it is closed source.
I hope this was informative. Remember, if you are like me & don’t like waiting for Flash to load, just include this nice little Google filter… -file:.swf…. This should take care of it. In this new era, we will hopefully see much improvement of flash files & see a influx of web developers willing to use it for promotion of their sites. Can you see the counter scandel happening all over again? Have a good day, get ready for the 4th as we kick off what will hopefully be a better turn out for donations for supporting our troops through tangible items they need.