Comments on: SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news

By: Aphrodisiac

Aphrodisiac — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:20:04 +0000

Goodness me all this stuff with flash, SEO and google is just odd

By: Gordon

Gordon — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:55:57 +0000

Out of curiosity: Can’t flash developer use flash as a progressive enhancement to an otherwise standards compliant XHTML site? I never fully understood why Flash developers do not use their ActionScript to access the DOM to get content into their flashcrap. This way, they would not need to provide alternate content. The site would be fully indexable, accessible and degrades gracefully. And no need for Google to enhance their spiders in this direction.

By: uize

uize — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:48:22 +0000

I’m not sure I’m ready to agree with the statement “This is good news for all rich applications.” If Google does a better job of indexing into rich applications that are implemented in SWF than it does at indexing into rich applications implement using JS/CSS/XHTML, then standards based rich applications could suffer.

It all depends on how thoughtful Google is with how it proceeds, and if Google remains very deliberately even handed and provides equal advantage each step of the way.

Of course, I’m a little bit biased towards Google encouraging Web technology development in the direction of standards rather than plug-ins / alternate universes.

By: rockacola

rockacola — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:41:03 +0000

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

Wow.. google indirectly killing off SWFObject and force us to stay away from good practice…

By: Schill

Schill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:50:23 +0000

It looks like (and just a guess here) that URLs to .swf files may being parsed; I did a search for a .swf I author which is written out via JS, and it is showing up in search results. It would appear that a bit of inline JS which declares a variable with a URL to load is being noted at the least- eg. var url = ‘/path/to/some/movie.swf’

By: Schill

Schill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:05:46 +0000

So does this mean we should expect a flood of “Loading…” and “skip intro” text coming soon to search engine results? ;) Jokes aside, it will be interesting to see if and how the context of content is shown since SWFs may be little more than sequences of animated content or images, in some cases. Ultimately, being able to parse strings out of any binary/movie format is good if it will expose good content.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:50:30 +0000

Horrible. In 10 years from now, MS will buy Adobe and then all the web will be a hybrid of Flash and Silverlight named Flashlight. No more HTML cuz Flash is so fancy.