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#1
01-10-2006
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Revisting How Search Engines Deal With Flash
Moderator Note: Thread split from Do Designers Hate SEO?.
While we're on the topic of Flash and SEO, can anyone comment on whether the major engines are working on a way to spider flash. There's been a rumor around that Google Big Daddy, http://66.249.93.104, will have this functionality. Has anyone else heard this? Also, any tips on how to integrate flash into a website without losing SEO functionality would be helpful. Thanks! Last edited by dannysullivan : 01-13-2006 at 08:32 AM. 
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#3
01-10-2006
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I also started out in the Flash world - thingking I'd grow up to be a world-renowned Flash Designer (in Flash 3!), and now I design programs and processes for implementing SEO... What happened? Corporate. Interestingly enough, I have more Flash web developer freinds than SE-friendly developer friends, and most of them work independently. The difference is - working in-house in large companies, the people at the top, and the people who read the numbers every day are the ones who ultimately set the pace to say "we need more search engine traffic". That is passed down the SEO person like me. My job is to do two things: 1. Pass the message from the higher-ups to the project mgrs that we need more search engine traffic and to do that we might need to change design. A project mgr might not be as emotionally involved in the design, and so that makes it easier for me than going straight to the designer. The project mgr's task is to go to the designers and say - hey - if you want people to see your stuff we might have to tweak a few things. 2. Educate writers, developers and designers (and project mgrs) about how to build SEO into the creation process like usability. Like jetboy mentioned, SEO is not an afterthought, although thats how most people treat it - build then ask how are we SEO-ified? When I was working as a contractor, I felt like the tax (wo)man coming into the room when the designers were part of the SEO meeting. I was definitely the devil to them. In a corp environment, I'm more detached and its more about the numbers than the coolness. All that said, a good mix of optimized HTML and superfabulous coolio flash elements and images can work just fine. And I beleive effectively spidering flash without all the spam junk is probably (way down) on the list for the search engines (and Macromedia/Adobe probably too), but would absolutely help bridge the gap between designers and SEO's. I hope. Its also worth mentioning that Flash is so much more dynamic than back in the day when we SEO people were Flash designers - lots more text-based and database-driven info can flow through flash, so there is more for SE's to work with, should they decide to. Last edited by L : 01-10-2006 at 04:16 PM.
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#4
01-10-2006
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*Its also worth mentioning that Flash is so much more dynamic than back in the day when we SEO people were Flash designers - lots more text-based and database-driven info can flow through flash, so there is more for SE's to work with, should they decide to.*
Nice one L, that was the message I was trying to pass across, but coming from an SEO, they couldn't seem to get past that ;-)
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#5
01-10-2006
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Flash is my friend. Flash is good. But... as pointed out, flash does get indexed, and I have examples of my own flash content getting indexed, but G is not very effective at indexing it, and a lot of content is missed.
The problem, as pointed out by glengara is that Flash is so incredibly dynamic. If you can dream it, you can make it. Everything from simple animations, to full-fledged database driven apps. With actionscript 2.0 you can program on a java level, meaning that the search engines don't always know how to read what you have done, because it is totally unique. No one has ever made something like it, and so the search engine does not have the logic to try and use it, to get info out. As an example, I programmed a job tracking tool for our company extranet. This tool allows employees to slice and dice jobs, projects and leads in a number of ways, using filters. They can for example, set filters to view jobs that closed last month, for over $100,000, that are 90% likely to close, that were web leads, that are assigned to a specific sales rep, where the last phone call to the client was made last week. A human user can be trained how to use the filters, turn them on and off, etc. However, a bot would not be able to fiqure it out, and would just get a lot of random data out of the app. For straight-forward animations, and links, they seem to be able to spider and index them pretty effectivly though.
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#6
01-11-2006
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The problems of indexing and ranking flash for the search engines.
1. Where to start, where is the main content? frame 10 on layer 2??? Your guess is as good as mine. 2. Whats to stop a person from importing text files, xml feeds or database driven content into frames,scenes and layers that are never called or used... 3. How do you write a program that understands heavily actionscripted files that have to be triggered to pull in content... 4. Let say we get all the content from all the source files, xml, or database. How do we organize it and break it up like an html site would. and thats just a short list
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#7
01-11-2006
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I used to be a hardcore flash person (circa 1999), but have now opted for the hybrid model now that SEO has become so important.
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#8
01-12-2006
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mtweed and vayapues,
Curious as to what parts of your flash was indexed? Was it text that lived on a certain layer in the flash module itself? Was it dynamic text being pulled in from somewhere externally? Otherwise?
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#9
01-12-2006
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#10
01-12-2006
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Awesome jaidai - thanks! I've been looking for someone who's done more intensive testing to see what works at the moment and what doesnt, since i only have limited resources at the moment to test with. Finally! Good stuff.
True, it may not be all that important but 1. We all know every little bit counts in SEO, when you have over 100 little bits that factor into a ranking, why not try to optimize as many as possible? Also part of determining best practices. 2. I personally have to know everything. Its a problem I'm aware of and working on. (self-label: brown nose geek).  Last edited by L : 01-12-2006 at 07:48 PM.
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#12
01-12-2006
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I sort of got into SEO via Flash as well - some may remember me as the moderator at were-here.com (the xml forum).
First of all, at least until recently the SE's wouldn't/couldn't read compressed swf files and the swf files are by default compressed since I think Flash 5. You have to set the compression to "not" if you want your Flash movie to be able to be read. Secondly, one of the main reasons why Flash is not usually to be found ranking highly is that nobody links to the movie. Everyone links to the page that the movie is on and the search engines treat each swf as if it is it's own page. So, people put the swf on the "index.html" page and then get a bunch of links to that page but what they need to do is link directly to the swf. That has served me well in my testing. I make two swf files (being sure to not compress them), put them both on a html page and then (at least so far) I can be sure that each swf "page" has only one link coming in and they are both from the same page so now any test to do with text on page evaluation can be done with a pretty good chance that there are no outside influences. If you want to know if a page ranks higher with the keyword at the beginning rather than the end of the page it is easy to find out (a very simple example). The latest version of Flash has provision for the title tag too, so now swf files can have titles which is the other main reason why they didn't rank well. Try having your mortgage site rank with a title of "Welcome" or "Home Page" and see how far you get. Whilst I haven't had a swf rank highly for "mortgages" or "viagra" I did manage at one time to get a swf to rank 114 for "nigritude ultramarine" a while back when that "contest" was going on (which I figured wasn't all that bad, considering). I used a whole bunch of other swf files to link to it rather than html anchor text just to be really sure that it could be done. Anyway, I could go on but most of what passes for information about Flash is simply uninformed opinion. I used to regularly prove it on the seo forums (under the "flash-seo" name) but I don't much bother anymore. Simple searching will turn up Flash "pages" with pagerank - http://www.google.com/search?q=music+filetype%3Aswf find at about #1 a swf with a "title" of "The Music House:Sounds" (as opposed to the usual "Loading 10% 20% ...") - go directly to the file and file a pr of 3 (other swf files that can be found on searches for mortgages (which I did just a minute ago) can be found with pr of 5 and I do know of a few with pr6 and one with pr7. Now a search for "music house" http://www.google.com/search?q=Music+House finds 170 million results and there at #8 is our swf. Of course it doesn't rank for "house music" but still ... ... and I'd bet that swf has only one link directly to it - that being from its containing page. I'd also bet that if I gave the swf say 2 or 3 links from decently themed sites with good pr it'd be #1. I sort of wish that people weren't catching on to what you can do with swf files, it has served me well for a few years now - I found out by accident that you could do tons of stuff with swf files and have used it ever since with good results I think. I'd even bet that I could make that swf #1 for "music house" using only links from other swf files but I won't bother - that example took me all of 2 minutes to find and I can (and have) found 100's like that. All that is a little off topic but I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Flash being slandered. I have the opposite problem and that is telling clients that I'm going to use Flash and they go to some forum or ask some other seo and then I have a big problem convincing them that what I want to do is right and they say "but every well-known seo says don't use Flash" - it isn't the designers I have the trouble with it is the seo. I have referred to myself as a "seo" but it isn't really the case, most of my work is in other fields but I am very interested and do "dabble" a bit ie I have a few select clients that I do seo for. Greg.
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#13
01-13-2006
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Did some searching here, and Text in Flash Animation and Options for Flash Files are older threads on the subject with some useful info. But great new stuff here, thanks, all!
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#14
01-13-2006
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Another successful tactic for us, as mentioned a few posts up, has been to use both flash, as well as seperate indexable dynamic php pages. I programmed an extensive shopping cart in flash, that now has over 80,000 products. To insure all products get indexed, I created a seperate php script, that pulls the products out of the database, and presents them to SE's in a more freindly format. If a user searches and finds the page, there is a link from that page directly into the shopping cart to buy the product.The Flash Shopping Cart And The PHP Search Engine Friendly Pages Last edited by vayapues : 01-13-2006 at 09:12 AM.
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#16
01-13-2006
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instead of something like this - http://www.mansgarage.com/view_produ..._Race_deck.php Thanks, I would really interested in that data, since many seos agree that dynamic pages do not do as well as urls that look have the appearance of hand coding. BTW, I love your shopping cart. Nice!
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#17
01-16-2006
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Here are 3 links for you to enjoy:
Cool tool for "How do search engines see your Flash files?" Forget The Traditions: Optimize Your Flash By Brittany Thompson Published: 2004-08-11 And my personal favorite... Google, Flash and SEO
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#18
01-16-2006
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Thank you for the compliment on the shopping cart. If anyone wants it let me know, I will email you the code base, no charge. Now to answer your question. If you look up Race Deck Flooring Free Flow. Yellow in G. we come up # 1. http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ow%2E+Yello w Granted this is a pretty darn specific search, but it does demonstrate that the products are getting spidered.
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#20
01-16-2006
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Arrggghhh .... so much disinfo - why oh why do all these articles never mention the most important thing - that being that every Flash movie is its own page and not part of its containing page? Putting a Flash movie on a page and expecting that page to rank is as futile as putting up a page with just an jpeg on it and expecting it to rank, or putting a certain jpeg on a html page and expecting that the html page will rank better than if a different jpeg (named the same) is on it (more or less).
Again, Google views a Flash movie as ITS OWN PAGE, as if the whole object tag is just a link. It then reads the swf file as if it were just another html page. I have no idea why all the articles completely ignore that - and this is the most important thing about Flash movies and Google. Admittedly, the resultant indexed Flash page has no title or other meta tags (pre Flash 8) but still. Read the articles again, with the FACT that each Flash movie is ITS OWN PAGE in mind and notice how now they don't really make much sense. This bugs me more or less as much as the number of supposed SEOs that still don't know the difference between "effect" and "affect" but I digress. If anyone really wants to know about how Google sees Flash just make a swf file and then use .htaccess to rewrite the ".swf" to ".html". Then link to the ".html" page (which is really the Flash movie) and watch what you can do with the rankings, etc. Honestly, those articles are basically useless when it comes to the actual question of how Google and Flash work - they completely miss the point. As do all the sites that use the Macromedia swf viewing tool and for some reason assume that Google uses it. Better to use a text only browser to check out an swf, or just rename a ".swf" to ".txt" and open it with Notepad or another word processor. If you get that far then try again with two identical Flash movies but leave one compressed and the other one make it uncompressed (Publish Settings/Flash tab/Options and make sure "compress movie" is not checked). Here are two snippets - one from the default compressed and the second from the same swf but uncompressed - First compressed - CWS. xœ«``?g`à_ÀÀÀÃÈà"È ÎLÿÿÿ·gÎ 2§%10Ød”äæØÙd¤&¦ØÙ”d–ä¤Ú…€H…ÌbÏÜ‚ü¢’ļ}ˆŒ?>D]R~J¥?GjNN¾Bx~QNŠ?>X( 2Œ??dQIIQbr*ƒ*8Ã!~ Ÿ‘?…‘-¾81¯Èab¨b :Ôsê?Ês/®ß ðc* #ƒHî?h008eVåç%*„e&¦%ò2t²±1µHLîѨçÔªajçZ?K{ Ri¥BI~e±BFjQ*/CP‡”çÑ@ Ô•HÊ - Second uncompressed - FWS. x _ D Cÿÿÿ?h –b <html><head><title>Title is Important</title></head><body>Hello World</body></html> ttrace = ÿ _sans @ . wû £° ø*4 ÿ ( Arizona Viagra ‰ “Œ( - wû ¨° ø*4 ÿ ( buy toys here Š IÅQ @ - Notice which is easier to read? I should note that in both of them I left the trace statements in (again, in Publish Settings), which allowed me to put the html tags in. These "tests" took me about 2 minutes to do and yet all of these supposedly helpful articles don't mention any of this which goes back to what I said in the first post about most of the "facts" about Flash and SEO being merely unsubstantiated opinion based on other opinions. There are literally hundreds of different little methods to improve Flash rankings - notice how I used the trace statements to give Flash a title? Well, there are further improvements I could have made like splitting up the trace statements and putting the content on the proper frames etc to make it look almost exactly like a html file (half the trace at the start up to the opening body tag and then the closing body tag in the second trace statement). Anyway, my point is that these people writing the articles that I have just read really don't seem to have much of a clue or offer any really useful info where Flash and SEO are concerned. Oh well - their loss as they'll just have to learn it properly in a few months when it becomes important to know how to do these things (think Adobe and Flash "merger", think Adobe video editing, think Flash's ability to combine video and code, think about a red car in a video with the info "red car" in text as the red car comes into the video and bookmarks, think Google indexing video, etc).
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