Google is improving their ability to index FLASH!

[sdolinsky]

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improved Flash indexing

Here's the first paragraph:
We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.

What do you guys think?

[emd5005]

I think this is a good thing for search engines and those search engines, but will encourage people to use flash intros and other tacky and annoying flash sites. Having a site made up of all flash is just a bad idea- what if your customer can't view flash? Then you lost a lead.

[sunup]

tynyumuim,i

www.Elements Gutter Cleaning

[HarveyJ]

Sunup: Keywords stopped being crucial since search engines started working more like people and less like robots. They look for words that are related to each other and their consistent and contextual usage...
Not a single keyword and a particular density or placement.

I think this is a good thing for search engines and those search engines, but will encourage people to use flash intros and other tacky and annoying flash sites. Having a site made up of all flash is just a bad idea- what if your customer can't view flash? Then you lost a lead.

In this day and age, with the exception of people browsing on an iPhone, who can't view Flash?
Seriously, it's plays for IE7, which is only about 80% of the market now. FireFox 2 plays it as well...
You're missing out on the people that use Opera, Safari and SeaMonkey? You honestly think they're really going to buy immediately anyway?

[emd5005]

Who can't view flash? There are actually a lot of flash that people can't view because the plugins don't download or install correctly. I personally have no problem viewing flash, but then again, I know computers- I know when to install plugins and when to upload my browsers.

However- i get your point. The majority of people CAN view flash. And its great that Google is beginning to index flash sites- as they'll finally have more of a shot at ranking in the search engines. However- I advise greatly against flash intros, and heavily against all flash sites.

[flnazrael]

A lot of corporate firewalls block Flash.

And Flash sucks. It's annoying as hell, and you can achieve almost anything with more accessible technologies like AJAX.

With that said, there is a "white hat" way to completely optimize a Flash site and have its content 100% accessible to Googlebot (or any Javascript based crawler). Have a conditional statement that, if Javascript is present, use it to call the Flash applet, and if it isn't present...have an HTML only version of the page. That way, visitors see only the Flash, but crawlers see the pure content in text format.

[mtheory]

I design almost exclusively in Flash for its presentation and interactive capabilities. Not to mention seamless integration of multimedia.

Use a swf object javascript to embed your Flash and the the search engines will index you just like any other page.

[matt_15]

If you want your website to be high up in google, but also want to use flash; you create, almost like a landing page, which is a static text page that is super optimized, and then link that page through to a dynamic or a flash page.

[mtheory]

If you want your website to be high up in google, but also want to use flash; you create, almost like a landing page, which is a static text page that is super optimized, and then link that page through to a dynamic or a flash page.

Not necessary if Flash optimization is done properly.

[chrispalko]

I'm sure this improvement still won't match their ability to index non-flash sites so I see no benefit until the ability of indexing is equal.

[flnazrael]

One option, <noembed> tags, have been around forever... but the best way to optimize Flash sites is what I described above though. It's a white hat way of presenting a completely optimized version to crawlers, that any user with JavaScript enabled (95&#37 won't even see.

[jackfranklin]

Flash is the good thing to update in google because it will be more effective than now.

[jg42122]

They have been saying this for about a year or so but I have not seen any improvements

[sunup]

Man I wish my original posts were here. I deleted them when my stupid competition had me scared for a second. Now I'm taking him to court if he don't leave me alone. Its up to him.