Designers Rejoice, Google Crawls Flash

Monday, July 14, 2008

Before you can walk, you need to crawl. And before you could design large portions of your site with Flash, Google needed to learn how to crawl...and index...and ... you get the picture. Well, they did it.

That’s right, a partnership between Adobe and Google and Yahoo, has opened the door for proper search indexing for dynamic content and rich internet applications.

Identifying user embedded information, the search engines will be able to use the Adobe Flash Player Technology to see what’s actually going on in the SWF (Flash file format) files—something that was previously impossible.

As a result, SEO-conscious sites would often forgo prettier design elements for key content in favour of simple, easy-to-access content. Now that this content is no longer invisible (or at least very difficult to find) in the eyes of the engines, search quality will improve.

Is this going to dramatically effect the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) that you’re used to? As you know, it’s difficult to immediately shoot up the results pages, even due to algorithmic refinements—but this does give Flash-heavy sites to be indexed, deemed relevant and given the credit that’s due to them in automated search.

Because this is a new element to Google’s algorithm, expect some changes in it as it matures. Adobe is committed to continually working with the top two engines, and expect the others to follow suit. It is, after all, in Adobe’s best interest to enable the search functionality of one of it’s most popular products.

Look for more information of Flash optimization to be appearing soon.  For more from the big guys themselves, check out the Official Google Blog Post and Adobe’s press release

Crawl, Google, crawl. Aww geez. Someone get my camera. They grow up so fast.

Posted by Chris Breikss on 07/14 at 11:43 AM
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