Saturday, May 10, 2003

Optimizing Flash for Search Engines
Macromedia Flash and other non-HTML formats can pose problems for search engines, unless you take appropriate steps to optimize the content.

"Search engines were originally built to index and serve HTML documents," said Tim Mayer, Vice President of Web Search at FAST. "Now the web has become more diverse in content types, knowing how to treat Flash and other types of content has become more important for search engines."

"These other content types present different challenges to the search engines," Mayer continued. "For example, Flash files generally contain too little text whereas PDF documents contain too much text. The technology to include differing content types and score them appropriately will become even more important as new areas in web search become more important -- such as real time data which will provide the challenge of lacking inbound links."

Flash is the leading vector graphics technology for creating design-focused web sites. Over 98 percent of Internet users can view Flash content with the Flash player software already installed in their browsers. Over 490 million people use the Flash player.

Gregory Markel, Founder/President of Infuse Creative, an entertainment and technology consulting company, discussed issues related to search engine visibility and Flash sites. "The good news is that FAST Search and Google can follow embedded links within the [Flash] files," he said.

FAST built its Flash indexing capabilities using the Macromedia's Flash search engine software developer's kit (SDK). The SDK was designed to convert a Flash file's text and links into HTML for indexing.

"Not all search engine spiders have the ability to crawl or index Flash, he said. "As far as I am able to determine, Google has not included the Flash-SDK setup for indexing, like FAST. But Google can follow embedded links."

Markel warned that the Macromedia's SDK solution is far from perfect. "All it does is it takes whatever [content] is there, and converts it to an HTML version. But the converted HTML doesn't include anything you actually need to do well in the search engines. No title tags, alt tags, body text, etc. SDK is a step in the right direction, but has a long way to go."

"One of the big problems with Flash content is that it's very hard to find," stated Tim Mayer. "We have a lot of Flash content in the FAST index, though I've rarely come across a Flash file, myself, in the main search results."

One of the reasons for the paucity of optimized Flash files is that the search engine industry hasn't adopted SDK as the standard, explained Mayer. "The SEOs out there don't know that we're actually going to index their files," he said, "so they don't prepare them in an optimized way (for the SDK). This will change as more search engines adopt this."
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2200921

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