Eastline Marketing S.A.L.

By Wissam Badine

Basic information

Adobe kept Flash content in proprietary owned and protected code. That’s why Google's Flash indexing was limited. However, thanks to Adobe, Google and Yahoo have now the proprietary technology that allows them to make use of Flash SWF files. 66,200,200 flash format files were found after an advanced search. This means that a very huge amount of Flash content, previously considered unreachable, is now accessible, useful, and potential.

In which way did search results change?

This example used by Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog shows search results before and after installing the new Flash crawling technology:

Before:


After:


Google can now expose more significant information and this is where the divergence resides. But despite this big improvement in accessibility, can Google index Flash in the best way and reach the first rank in terms of optimization?

Adobe and Google published a press release tackling this subject and received comments from readers. Three points can therefore be concluded to form the main steps of the optimization techniques for Flash pages:

1. The written information with Flash can be optimized for specific key sentence to support focused rankings.
2. Text navigation in the site and text links can include key sentences in order to improve relevance of the destination page. This is solely applicable when Flash is divided into parts kept in different files. For instance, the Flash file is divided into segments put in different URLs (i.e., page1.swf, page2.swf, etc.). This strategy can be followed instead of creating a website in one flash file. (i.e. www.xyzname.com/site.swf)
3. Bolding can be a way to grant more importance to key sentences. It is not yet sure if the recent technology recognizes text emphasis even if it seems a valid capacity.

What is the difference between HTML and Flash concerning Search Engine Optimization?

Some crucial elements can exclusively be optimized in HTML not in Flash, like heading tags, images, image tags, etc. Also, page to page link popularity is not probable nor is deep linking accessible. This is applicable when a Flash site is only made of one single SWF file. Therefore, the home page always ends up as the last and final destination for searchers.

It is obvious that Flash has witnessed a remarkable development and is more search engine friendly than before. However, it still cannot strive against an efficient and well optimized HTML site for victory. If an exception is inevitable, it would only be in case Flash site has a huge amount of links to it. If not, Flash will never be worthy of competition.

Eastline Marketing is always on the lookout of new developments in the search engine optimization. If your site is Flash-based, we can help you in its optimization and increase its online visibility by opting for our online advertising services.

Contact us for more details!