Google Now Crawls Flash Content
Once again, I got to apologize to the few of you who follow this blog for the lack of updates and posts in recent weeks. My hands are so tied up with work, friends, family, watching EURO and more work these days, I’m starting to wonder how other in-house SEOs squeeze out time to blog at all. Aside from that, I also don’t feel like beating any dead horse by spilling my two cents on every SEO issue on the horizon, since I’m usually late to post my thoughts compared to other SEOs who have better time management skills than I do.
So what made me want to post today? Well, the wait is finally over, the Google announcement of their new-found ability to crawl and index flash files really is a big news and relief to me. I really couldn’t count the number of times that I have had to struggle with designers and editors and preach to them about how the gorgeous, fancy, creative and eye-catching flash content and navigation are not going to sit very well with the crawlers and myself from an SEO perspective.
Like many of you, we have used numerous alternatives to inject (hide?) some HTML text to and around the flash to make sure we wouldn’t lose anything from using the flashy content. Oh, before you start to accuse me of using gray hat or shaddy SEO tactics, the way we did it was legit and we never stuffed keywords behind the flash, and I was actually told that we had Google’s green light to do what we were doing (Oh, yeah, I know the conspiracy theorists are going to start another round of those “big corporations get to do all the shady SEO stuff without getting caught…” comments, but that’s not my point here).
We shall see how successfully Google’s new flash crawling/indexing algorithm will work, and I wonder how the new algorithm will affect the current rankings when “new content” is discovered from existing sites. Yahoo! is also said to receive similar help from Adobe to improve their flash crawling and indexing ability, let’s wait and see again. Nevertheless, this is definitely a good news to us, at the very least, we no longer have to battle the designers and developers for using flash for content anymore.
Also, check out SearchEngineLand, they have a very informative article on this news.
