Google Announces Improved Flash indexing

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Went Hot: Jul 02, 2008 - 08:53 am
Posted By: MattMcGee 380 Days ago
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
Category: Vertical Search

From the official announcement: "If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches."

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from planetc1 380 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Jumped from twitter to here to see if it was submitted. While it’s not flash, I’m wondering about large pdf files. I have some searchable magazines (100mb pdfs) and I’m concerned they are too big to load if clicked on.

from semscholar 380 Days ago #

Votes: 1

Actually I like this title better because it sets expectations with the word ’improves’.

from claye 379 Days ago #

Votes: 0

Better brush up on your Flash skillz designers because whether SEOs like it or not, the market for Flash sites just shot up. I though Bruce Clay’s article on site owners should still avoid Flash but the reality is that just about everybody thinks that they want a "really glossy, interactive Flash site." In my experience as a designer, in the past I have had to persuade around 75% of my clients to forgo a pretty Flash site for a more SEO-friendly website but we don’t really have that excuse anymore, do we? I still favor a clean HTML site but I’m betting that we’re going to see a lot more light-weight, user-friendly flash sites (complete with separate URLs) in the future.

from DarkMatter 379 Days ago #

Votes: 0

"but we don’t really have that excuse anymore, do we? "don’t count your chickens just yet. Improved indexing doesn’t mean it’s weighed heavily in the algorithm. Past experience tells me that Google gives flash text about as much weight as alt tags, which is not much at all. There’s nothing to indicate that this has changed, just that they will now index more text.besides, there are multiple problems with flash beyond it’s indexability. Some people create entire websites within the same big flash document that lives on one html page. You can’t use the back button, you can’t cut and paste, you can’t specify H tags to give precedence to information, you can’t link to specific "pages". I would not use flash for anything but multimedia presentations and possibly a nifty menu system. But even then I’d still include text links somewhere. Flash is still a weak choice.

from WayneSmallman 375 Days ago #

Votes: 0

All in all, this is good news for web designers, developers and SEOs alike."If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us."Not sure that’s exactly future proof. Would be better for Google to come up with a special attribute, perhaps?