I have been discussing this question on flex-india since last week and saw many and verity of responses in developer’s and client’s point of view and saw some blog reactions to it as by Abdul Qabiz. Thought I would post my point of view on this topic whether search engines should index SWF content or not.
There are mainly two aspects to this question first developer and second customer/businesses, my opinion is kind of mixed of both. There is valid questions raised during this discussion as “RIAs are application not the content, hence cannot be seen as content holder as HTML. Does your desktop search index your desktop applications?”
First half of this statement is absolutely correct that RIAs are the applications BUT if your application is on internet then it is bound to deals with the content and if it is dealing with content then it becomes mandatory for enterprises to have it search engine friendly in order to increase “visitors + business + revenue”. That is why we call it Rich Internet Application (RIA).
I would like to quote statement stated by Chuck Frazier on flex-india thread, he says “RIA’s are applications and Flex has allowed my website to operate much like a desktop app. I love it for that reason. But if no one knows I exist, then it doesn’t matter how fantastic my website is. It would be like cooking a wonderful banquet, but I didn’t send out invitations to my friends. So the fact that SEO and web crawler techniques do not apply well to Flash / Flex is definitely a concern for anyone that wants to make money with their website.“
And this is definitely a concern and deciding factor for many enterprises to choose flash/flex as front end technology.
In desktop world the “visitors + business + revenue” factor is not there and hence it is not required for them to be indexed.
I love flex as much as any flex evangelist would but I do not want to see swfs used only for animation or as applets, today how many are using applets, when SUN released it as an internet applications technology (Applets are used to provide interactive features to web applications that cannot be provided by HTML), and to avoid applet like fate we need to make swfs more content friendly, swfs have to leverage html capabilities and continue improving and evolving RIA platform.
My personal experience, it is difficult to convince your clients saying that flash/flex is not SEO friendly and you cannot treat them as HTML. However there are some techniques available such as Ted Patrick’s post about writing wrapper around your swf content for making it accessible to search engine crawlers. Also go through InsideRIA post about Google is using Adobe’s Search Engine SDK to crawl through SWF content.
It is very interesting to see how swfs get evolve in future keeping in mind applications and content friendliness. As Chuck says “I somewhat agree with Abdul about the content versus app issue, but at the same time I think we’re looking at an evolutionary jump that will blur the lines and make those ideas less applicable to the “new Web” that Flex developers are creating.”
I would like to hear your idea/opinion on this question.
Cheers,
Satish
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February 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
The biggest SEO problem re: Flash is – Google excludes/skips… does not index – pages with an invisible background Flash.swf in a ‘DIV’ layer, because ‘floating Flash’ is considered HTML page spam.
February 18th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
You are right Dave, the way google or any search engine finds swf is through its name, title or related text in its wrapper html, This kind of search has never been useful for ranking. I hope this will change soon.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:52 am
I’m not sure what the question is. What terms are you hoping will place which SWF within Google’s first ten results?
(btw, lots of background info & prior links here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aweblogs.macromedia.com+inurl%3Ajd+swf+seo )
jd/adobe
February 19th, 2008 at 11:11 am
@John Dowdell:
Thanks for your response.
The question was whether search engines should index SWF content or not, as swfs are application and should they be treated as their desktop counterparts (by not indexing their content)?
I got your links and went through that and I hear what you are saying, but using HTML wrapper, meta tags are the only way to achieve this? I am sure there are better ways.
SiteMaps protocol is surely a great way if my website is completely built on flash/flex, but again how exactly search engine is going to instantiate the sub page link which is in main swf?
As you said this whole field is murky and I feel it needs to be opened for discussion with community to make developers aware of it.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
“The question was whether search engines should index SWF content or not”
Thanks. If by “index” you mean “remember the text within a SWF”, then Google and others do. (Try searching on “‘contrary evidence’ filetype:swf”.)
If by index you mean “point to a SWF”, then they can, but searches usually point to the complete presentation, with the invoking HTML page.
I’m not sure what I said about “HTML wrapper, meta tags being the only way to achieve this”. My usual advice has been to (a) figure out on which plausible search terms you could conceivably place within the first page of results; then (b) make sure that your HTML and inbound anchor links don’t ignore those terms.
Most of the engines recommend using sitemaps now. I’m not sure I understand what “instantiate the subpage link” means in this context.
jd/adobe
February 19th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
@John Dowdell:
Yes by Index I mean “point to SWF” with valid page/subpage link, and what I meant by “Instantiate the subpage link” was when search engine finds text it will point to whole presentation, rather it should point to the link to that page which contains the actual text, as it happens normally. Now e.g. if you search for ‘contrary evidence’ filetype:swf and open second link, it will take you to swf (whole presentation), and I was not able to find page which contains the actual text i.e. “contrary evidence”.
And also I have a question regarding the kind of search we do to find swf content, why is it required to append “filetype:swf” to search for swf based websites. I don’t see this is required to search a ASP or JSP based web application content, I mean we don’t use “filetype:asp” or “filetype:jsp” to search web application built on ASP or JSP.
Also if you search normally (without filetype attribute) search engine do not return any links to swf file (at least I have not seen it till page 25 if I search for ‘contrary evidence’), I saw results linking to PDF, DOC, RTFs but not to SWFs (I mean It might be there in page 100 or may be beyond that but what is the point) does it mean that search engines consider content from swf less important than other?
I mean whatever I am asking is from my own experience or somebody asked me these questions which I did not have any answer for, hope you will shade some light on above questions.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:51 am
Google’s “filetype” operator is just a filter, so that you see only the filetype specified.
Rephrased, its use is not necessary to find the SWF; it merely hides anything which isn’t SWF.
(The ranking of results is a separate issue, and Google does not typically discuss its ranking mechanism.)
February 20th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Thanks for the information, I will be running some tests to gather more data about swf content and search results, will post it as soon as I get any updates.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I meant, should SWFs be searchable? I meant, people expect swfs to be same way html is, when it comes to SEO techniques. My view was, SWF, most of times, represent and application and if you try to make it super searchable by hardcoding all the text within swf, it doesn’t make sense..
I also mentioned, most of the search engines index swf files and show data in search results, that’s useful because you can get the pointer to swf. But it’s up to user to find what is the view that corresponds to the text (s/he searched). At the same time, it’s developer’s responsibility to make things easier – by having semantic markup in html (which wraps the swf) and having deep-links for views within swf…
I understand both business and development reasons, I probably think same you do. It’s just, I tried to explain things so that people don’t expect the same thing from swf as they expect from html – reasons are obvious, I still stand SWF is an application.
Thanks
-abdul
February 26th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
@Abdul:
I also think the same as you do, its developer’s responsibility to make things easier, provided right tools and techniques are available and issues like finding same view/state of page that corresponds to the text (s/he searched) are solvable by using deep linking or tools like SWFAddress
You have also mentioned that SWF static text is searchable by search engines, and yes I have seen some examples where Google lists some swf links if used filetype filter. I also came across Mat Cutt’s (from Google)
Interview
Where he mentioned that Google is using Adobe search engine SDK to pull out text from SWF. And also he advised to use this tool on SWF and find out what Google can read.
But on contrary I found much difference between Flash SWF and Flex SWF. Search engine SDK is not able to pull text out of my Flex SWF but it is able to read it from Flash SWF weird! Isn’t it.
But I still think there is definitely better way (which is yet to come) to expose your SWF content to search engines.