Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Flash and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Those of you who worked with Activo on SEO projects know that we have always opposed Flash. At Activo we always valued traffic over look & feel which translated into avoiding Flash technology altogether. Well, no more! If it is true that Flash sites can now receive ‘equal’ treatment, then we will give Flash its place in our Web Development practices.

In recent days, both Adobe and Google issued press releases and blog articles how Google’s crawler will be able to read into Shockwave (.swf) files. This means that all text, menus, and content that is embedded in a Flash object file will now be readable by search engines. Adobe published the Showkwave standards so search engines will be able to read it and Google was one of the first to respond and announce that it knows how to read Shokwave contents. What a welcomed change!

What this means is that we will now have additional parameters to take into account, especially in websites that have decided not to work with flash as their main platform but instead offer a small portion of their home page in flash (such as a banner or a rotating main message). Additionally, if this holds true and Google will be able to read into Shokwave (flash) files than we will start seeing more flash based sites coming up in the Organic search results from Google and search engines.

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