Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable

nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."

Comments

What Adobe should do

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of (or in addition to) giving search engines information on Flash, Adobe should tell Flash users when not to use it. Avoid putting large texts in a Flash application and not offering the same in HTML. This is pretty obvious to everyone with half a brain, but "web developers" often seem to "forget".

Re:What Adobe should do

[RangerRick98]

Agreed. I don't see why Flash content needs to be indexed by search engines, because no content worth indexing should be exclusively in Flash.

The only good things Flash has done are games and embedded video. Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible.

Re:What Adobe should do

[Peeteriz]

You don't index the web as it should be, you index the web as it is.
"Flash for entire websites is horrible and inaccessible." - probably yes, but there are such websites in noticeable amounts, so indexing them properly is a good thing. And maybe that will make them more accessible - via a deep link to the content you want, bypassing their flash menus.

Oh great

[Zerth]

Now we'll get black hat SEOs keyword stuffing flash files and adding flash widgets all over the place. /me never enabled flashblock before, but he might soon.

Great!

[nine-times]

Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want. And make the Flash plugin fast. And make it not crash so often. Oh and then, finally, come up with a real reason as to why we should use Flash instead of something else.

Once they do that, it'll be a great little format.

This seriously sucks

[Micah]

The fact that search engines couldn't index Flash was a strong argument against its use for textual content. With that excuse gone, more webmasters might consider using it.

Only problem is, Flash for textual content is HORRIBLE. Totally ruins the consistent experience I want with my web browser. Flash text does not behave like HTML text in several ways.

I really hope this doesn't encourage more Flash content from point-n-drool webmasters ...

Re:This seriously sucks

[Uzuri]

If they make it "crawlable", though, wouldn't that mean that the text is available to be read somewhere? And that means it's only a matter of time before someone designs a Flash translator that pulls the content (and say, LINKS?! #$%&@ flash developers) and turns it into straight XHTML.

I'd pay for that.

Re:This seriously sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Webmasters? The desire to barf Flash all over a page comes from "online marketing managers" (which I am), executives, people near the top of the pyramid and, by and large, people who just don't get it. These individuals will preface every decision with "when I browse I do", or "people don't want to do X, they want to do Y", often without a shred of evidence and, even more infuriatingly, in direct contradiction of someone who took the time to analyze the data in the first place.

Flash has its place, but it's a very narrow place and this announcement has removed one of my biggest trump cards (re: "no you can't have your retarded dancing monkey on the homepage, it wont bring in visitors and thus we'll lose revenue")

That's sad news

[John Hasler]

Lack of indexing may have been one of the only things holding back the total Flashification of the Web.

Re:Silverlight

[The Crooked Elf]

Frankly, though, I'm hoping that, rather than little feature additions like this, they do one of the following: * Make it NOT an absolutely ridiculous memory hog. * Invest some time in making it work with Firefox better (i.e., without the crashes). * Make it work under 64-bit because, frankly, it's really, really stupid that it doesn't. They've had half a decade now; I don't care how poorly written their code-base is.

Re:hmmmm

[no1home]

Actually, if web programmers would adopt and adhere to some 'best practices', flash, applets, and the like would be less of a problem. What they should include on each of their web pages is a way to toggle each movie and each sound, with the default being to not play until told to do so. I shouldn't need No Script to stop the wailing of a page.

And along the lines of what Google-Yahoo-Adobe are trying to achieve here, they should make it so we can right click on any of the links and get my usual menu options: open link in new window; in new tab; in IE tab (for those who use this); copy link location; bookmark; etc. Then it would be much more integrated into the web experience and we'd all be (at least a little) more comfortable with it.