Webmaster talk

1001 Webs · Guest

According to Adobe, they have "greatly improved our ability to index
Flash".
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

Can anyone testify to this statement being true?
Perhaps to early to tell?

Guest · Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 9:50 pm Post subject: Re: Indexing of Flash pages

1001 Webs <1001webs@gmail.com> wrote:

Mark Goodge · Guest

On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:50:04 GMT, (Matt Probert) put finger to
keyboard and typed:

Big Bill · Guest

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 06:39:57 -0700 (PDT), 1001 Webs
<1001webs@gmail.com> wrote:

John Bokma · Guest

(Matt Probert) wrote:

Kim André Akerø · Guest

Matt Probert wrote:

Guest · Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 5:45 pm Post subject: Re: Indexing of Flash pages

On Jul 6, 2:39 pm, 1001 Webs <1001w....@gmail.com> wrote:

1001 Webs · Guest

On 10 jul, 18:45, mynameisnobodyodys...@googlemail.com wrote:

1001webs.net · Guest

Google’s Flash Indexing Disaster

by Kevin Yank

On July 1st, Google announced that, using technology provided by
Adobe, it had enhanced the Google Search Engine to index the text
embedded within Flash movies. What followed was bad advice from
Google, second-guessing by web developers, and finally a few straight
answers.

Google’s initial announcement was so incredibly vague as to render it
all but useless. Developers came away knowing that Google was doing
something different with their Flash content, but that’s about it.

While Google’s Dion Almaer suggested that search engines have always
been black boxes and that it was up to us to discover what had changed
through testing, just about everyone else was crying foul.

Google’s credibility was immediately in question due to the obviously
bad advice it contained:

"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."

For the record, replacing fast-loading, accessible text content with a
bulky image simply to hide it from search engines is never a good
idea.

Google’s list of caveats in the announcement were similarly
perplexing:

"Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your
web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of
that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed."

What types of JavaScript? Established best practice for publishing
Flash content is to use the SWFObject JavaScript library to overcome
bugs in older browsers, so was Google saying that it would only index
Flash content that was authored using broken/outdated HTML-only
techniques?

"We currently do not attach content from external resources that
are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file,
an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that
resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content
in your Flash file."

Any experienced Flash developer knows that if you are going to have
any significant amount of text in your Flash content, your best bet is
to stick it in an XML file and load it on the fly, so you don’t have
to rebuild your Flash movie whenever you change the content.

Apparently, not only will Google not see Flash content authored this
way, but it will track down the XML file anyway and index it as a
separate page on your site! That’s right, Google will helpfully direct
people searching for your content to the raw XML file that contains
it, rather than your slick, Flash front-end.

All this stuff made so little sense, that many developers questioned
whether Google was actually able to index any Flash content of
consequence. Within a few days, however, the Search Engine War blog
was able to verify that Google was indeed indexing Flash content.

Finally, after several days of developer outcry, Google admitted it
had left too many questions unanswered, and four days later, it posted
a significant update that is well worth reading if you have any Flash
content on your site.

Here’s a quick summary of what we now know:

* The July 1st release didn’t index Flash content inserted with
the SWFObject library’s dynamic publishing method, which writes the
Flash content into the page entirely with JavaScript. The recommended
static publishing method (where two nested <object> tags are included
in the page) was indexed. Google is now deploying an update that
supports the dynamic publishing method as well.

* Text content loaded on-the-fly from an XML file is not yet
indexed, but Google is working on fixing this in the near term.

* Google will do its best to detect when duplicate content is
there to provide an HTML alternative to Flash content, and will only
display one of the two versions in the search results. No penalty is
applied to a site’s search ranking due to duplicate content.

There are still unknowns here, but that will always be the case with
the Google search engine. Though it took a few days, Google is
answering what questions it can, and responding to developer concerns
with enhancements.

Before very long, most of the text within Flash-based web sites will
make its way into the Google search index. Nevertheless, uncertainty
will remain over how deeply Google is able to probe Flash content for
a while yet. Providing non-Flash alternative content will remain an
effective means of guaranteeing your most important content a place in
the Google index. It also gives users of non-Flash-enabled browsers
(like the iPhone) something to look at.

Though Google’s initial message was pretty half-baked, the follow-up
has put most of my concerns to rest. How about yours?

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/16/google%e2%80%99s-flash-indexing-disaster/