Google Indexing the Content of Flash
October 24th, 2008This morning I had a call from a client here at Trigger. They were concerned about some misspellings in the description of their links in Google.
Pretty standard fair problem, not tough to solve. Update the content, resubmit the robots.txt and site map, done.
Except the content it was indexing turned out to be coming from inside a Flash component in the home page of the site.
Google is indexing the text content of SWFs.
I had heard they were working on this, but had no idea it would show up so soon.
It’s an exciting change because the one thing I’ve always gone back to with Flash sites is how hard they are to optimize. With that problem out of the way, agencies can get the full power of Flash behind their sites and not have to beat the big black obelisk with a bone like the monkeys in 2001: Space Odyssey to get traffic going there organically.
There’s a little information on the Google blog on this topic.
I’m looking forward to adding tactics around this innovation in the future.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Don’t forget that the indexing is still really basic, and organic HTML pages will still trump flash ones in a competitive space.
Also from a UX perspective if a site doesn’t have proper bookmarking of sections within the flash then you can end up with a high bounce rate when a visitor clicks and isn’t shown the information he/she thought they would see.
Lots of interesting things are happening in this space, can’t wait to see what is coming down the road.
~mike
October 29th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Me either. Tim Uruski over at CM made some interesting points via chat about this innovation as well.
Oddly I’m more interested all the broken Flash content of old getting indexed.
But I’m a bit of a QA sadist.