Comments on: Finally, Flash Becomes Truly Searchable

By: josh >> /dev/blog & » Blog Archive » transparent flash seo: still a way off

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:59:00 +0000

[...] getting mixed signals here about Flash SEO. I read Ryan Stewart’s post on Flash SEO. This passage stood out: We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player [...]

By: Bryan Gale

Bryan Gale — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:08:58 +0000

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

By: Buck DeFore

Buck DeFore — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:29:59 +0000

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.”

By: Kevin Merritt

Kevin Merritt — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:15:28 +0000

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.

By: Jean-Christophe TURIN

Jean-Christophe TURIN — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:49:02 +0000

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!

By: Jensa

Jensa — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:29:46 +0000

@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.

By: ryanstewart

ryanstewart — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:03:07 +0000

@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.

By: MrSteel

MrSteel — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:09:18 +0000

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

By: Kevin Merritt

Kevin Merritt — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:56:31 +0000

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.

By: Samiq

Samiq — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:58:33 +0000

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?