Finally, Flash Becomes Truly Searchable

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Update 2: Google posts about the new stuff and sheds some light on what will and won’t be indexed. (Props to Brian for the link)

Update: I did a Seesmic post below. It’s lame but I figured it was worth a shot.

It’s easy to get caught up in every new announcement when you’re an evangelist and I’ve definitely been overly excited a few times when I probably shouldn’t have but tonight is a really, really important milestone for anyone who is building Flash/Flex applications. One of the biggest pains/pressure points/disadvantages to using Flash is going to be minimized. We’re announcing today that we are working with Yahoo and Google to more accurately index SWF content.

So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.

The best part? You don’t have to do anything. Any SWF you already have out there will be indexed by this new player. Of course it won’t automatically be as good as HTML. Google won’t automatically deep-link your content or pull out unique URLs. So overnight I’m not sure a lot will change. But the most important part of this announcement to me is the fact that HTML and Flash can be on the same general footing when it comes to search engine optimization.

Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files.

SEO is big, big business. There are entire firms dedicated to it and a TON of money changes hands. Now Flash developers can get in on it and start figuring out how to optimize their SWFs to meet Google’s requirements. That’s pretty damn cool and it could result in a lot of money for the folks that figure it out first.

More links

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  3. Revver Finally Using Flash
  4. CNN Finally Goes with Flash Video
  5. Finally The On AIR Tour has come BACK…….To Europe
  • http://john.realeyes.com/ John

    I guess we need to remove all those “special” comments now eh?

  • Matt R

    Love the new site. Also, I agree. SWF searchability could be huge :)

  • http://phillipkerman.com/blog Phillip Kerman

    SEO is big but so are the scams related to it.

    I’ll spare you a list of references where you-all have already said Flash was SEO compatible.

    Anyway, back to the “you don’t have to do anything”. Wouldn’t I need to add some form of deep linking to support this? To make a search result link take the user to the exact part of my app?

    Don’t get me wrong–it sounds cool, but I don’t have a clear idea what it is that’s changed.

    Exactly what should I expect to see? When should I expect it?

  • ryanstewart

    @Phillip, that’s the big thing we don’t know. I have no idea how Google is going to treat the Flash content. You don’t have to do anything to have your content indexed, but that just exposes it to the search engines. God knows what they’re going to do with it.

    What I think will happen is that we’ll see a greater priority on things like deep linking (ie, you’ll have to have some kind of deep linking to get your SWF indexed correctly).

    But right now we’ve just provided the insght into the SWF file. Google and Yahoo are the only ones that know what that really means for developers. And we’ll all have to figure it out like we did with HTML.

  • http://www.insideria.com RJ
  • http://phillipkerman.com/blog Phillip Kerman

    Okay… well, it’s great… I mean, it’s the right direction. But… as much as I think Adobe has smart employees, I sorta think Google has smarter ones as far as making search engines. I just wonder what they really needed from Adobe to make this happen. The .swf format has been published for some time… I still don’t know what’s new here. Good direction–it sounds like it. But I read the links and I still don’t think I could explain what’s new. Plus, check out JD’s old posts that (for years) have said this was totally possible and a “non-issue” if I can respectfully paraphrase him.

  • http://bits.samiq.net/2008/06/flash-content-to-be-seo-on-google-and.html Samiq

    pingback from samiqbits

    [So the news just broke, Adobe will be providing Google and Yahoo with a special Flash player that is optimized to look over the content of your SWF's and crawl its content as if you were the one clicking buttons and navigating within.]

    these are great news indeed and a big bomb on the guys in Redmond… but is this a Yahoo and Google only deal? Where does Live Search stands?

  • http://www.blist.com Kevin Merritt

    Many of the reactions to this news seem to imply that the commenters think Adobe is the only winner in opening up SWFs. In reality it benefits Google even more. Why is that? What’s behind a SWF, at least in the case of a rich internet application like blist, is interesting and valuable content. Google has proven that anything they can index they can monetize.

    Google has a very valuable business but can only index half of the web. The other “dark” half is hidden by authentication or technologies its crawlers can’t navigate. This is just one step in Google’s plans to index as much of the Internet as they can.

  • http://mrsteel.wordpress.com MrSteel

    this just provide content to be readable, not linked by search engine… Ryan is right, this will surely lead to much more deep linking enable flash sites, cause now it gets bigger point, there won’t be need for alternative content which was really almost impossible to link between deeplink url and backend rendered page
    Thanks on the info. This kind of things I am sure are important to Adobe, Google and surely developers and clients

  • ryanstewart

    @Kevin, I agree. And in fact, I think Blist is a perfect example. Hopefully the new stuff will enable us to expose all of the blist info to people searching. That’s a big deal.

    And you’re right, Google does now get inside the black box of the web they couldn’t see before. But so much money and advertising revolves around them that this is more a win for our developer community.

  • http://www.flashgamer.com Jensa

    @Phillip Try the Flashagmazine take on this: http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/swfs_to_become_fully_searchable/

    I talked to Justin yesterday and asked him a lot of questions about how this works.

    J

  • http://www.blogen.fr Jean-Christophe TURIN

    Yeaah! It roax! Before I was making an html version of my Flash websites just to be referenced easily in search engines. Now I’ll have this time to make more design compared to before. I like this kind of announcement! :D

  • http://www.blist.com Kevin Merritt

    There still seems to be a little confusion about whether you can segment a “movie” into “pages” that can be uniquely linked to. You can. It takes a little work in Flex to implement, but the result is known as deep linking.

    Here’s an example in blist of the Top 25 Videos of all time on YouTube:

    http://app.blist.com/#/blist/asimmons/YouTube-All-Time-Best

    Before the updated searching approach by Google & Yahoo with Adobe’s help, everything to the right of the # sign would have been ignored as “just another anchor tag on a page I’ve already indexed.”

    I hope this helps clarify by example.

  • http://bcdef.org Buck DeFore

    I’m with Phillip on this one. There is a lot more misinformation about the Flash Player that needs honest addressing and winning over. To take on a battle like automagically SEO aggressive SWFs, which it’s unsure can ever be the case, is not advisible. There are better headlines to be running.

    Meantime, this is a deal killer for me:

    “We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.”

  • http://www.bryangale.com/codeblog Bryan Gale

    A little tangential, but could this special version of the Flash player have applications to automated functional testing?

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