massiveProCreation Blog

From the early days of Flash Player search engine optimization wasn’t his strong site. The reasons for that where basically two:

• Flash content was not index by Google because Google’s bots couldn’t run the swf file and search through it.
• Flash has a static url, which is very bad because we cannot link to the specific content (library’s like SWFAddress solve this problem).

Until 2008 Google haven’t index Flash files at all. In 2008 Adobe has made a search crawler version of the Flash player, it could extract the link and text from dynamic text fields. That was great but the problem was that Adobe’s bot only crawled through the main swf file, it haven’t index the external data sources like HTML, XML or swf. Until now, from June 18th 2009 Google has ability to also index the externally loaded content!

What can Google bot do now (source: Webmaster Central Blog):

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with ActionScript, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

What should you do to improve SEO for Flash?

• Use text fields for links and text, avoid using graphic text like images, they wont be indexed by Google.
• Create new url for each section of your website.

That should do the trick.

P.S Please tell me what you think!


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