A huge (and long overdue) update from Adobe enables search engines to better index content within multi-state swfs.
Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
As Michelle Turner, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe Systems, notes:
The great thing is that this is retrospective – the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
This is terrific news for rich media content publishers. I can’t wait to read more about how it works.