Top 3 questions about Google - Adobe Flash indexing & SEO

Posted by Matt Johnson on July 7, 2008

Rightfully, there’s a lot of excitement around Adobe, Google and Yahoo cooperating to index web content contained in SWF files. I am also particularly interested to follow Ryan Stewart’s Flash SEO contest.

In his post, Ryan briefly alludes to some outstanding concerns and unaddressed issues regarding SWF indexing. I’ve tried to dig in to all the coverage, particularly the deeper analysis in the days following the basic Adobe Flash / Google indexing announcement, and really zero in on the biggest outstanding questions where the existing knowledge base and body of experimental results are the thinnest on the ground.

The top three questions that are very important and do not already have good answers are:

  1. Is content in SWFs subordinate to standard HTML content (either implicitly (doesn’t look as clean as HTML) or explicitly)?
  2. How does Google read data in an XML payload vs. text contained in the SWF itself?
  3. Will Google treat # anchor tags that are common in deep-link URLS in Flash differently than they treat the # in regular HTML pages (ignore everything to the right)?

I have also collected a handful (if you have 6 fingers) of the most valuable blog resources so far that critically investigate the new Google / Adobe SWF indexing news:

  1. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html
  2. http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1478
  3. http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2008/07/06/update-on-swf-indexing-issues/
  4. http://mondaybynoon.com/2008/07/07/current-events-googles-improved-flash-indexing/
  5. http://www.noirmatstudios.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/06/google-search-reaches-out-to-flash-content/
  6. http://www.afhill.com/blog/2008/07/01/flash-indexing/

If you know of other incisive and precise resources that add detail and clarity around Google indexing SWFs - please add links in comments. Thanks!

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2 Responses to “ Top 3 questions about Google - Adobe Flash indexing & SEO ”

I’m thankful for that sixth finger! :)
As for the three questions above, here’s my speculation:
1. I believe it will be ranked lower. It’s generally accepted that semantic markup in HTML helps your ranking. Text within a flash file won’t have such markup, so everything within the flash will have equal ranking. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be ranked as highly as the HTML, therefore.

2. I did see mention that while google would index externally linked files from within the flash, it would treat them as separate assets. I assumed this to mean they would (also?) show up in the search results as separate filetypes. I actually had assumed .swfs would show up like this too (there is already filetype:swf available in the advanced search), not as completely integrated as some seem to assume they will be.

3. I have NO IDEA how deep-linking will be achieved, I’m really interested to see how it is managed. I don’t see a way for a search engine spider to determine the appropriate deep-links simple from engaging within the .swf. Perhaps sitemaps are about to become even more important??

Left by Andrea Hill on July 8th, 2008


Thank you so much for making this list of articles. I surely will pass them on. There has been a real push lately for flash content which I think is great but truly there are sites like MicroSoft office live sites that do not play with javascript. Thank heaven that many of the sites I build things with have all the different variation and make a code that plays well with my chosen ad sites. Will be very interesting to see how this plays out. It’s nice to think that perhaps I will finally be able to get my little diddis to play with out having to change the code for so many. I hope that’s the goal here in the end.

ps. anyone know some free soft ware that can easily change videos over to youTubes format…LJ

Left by Lady J talks on July 9th, 2008


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