Flash For The Search Engines - By: Jeff Beale

Flash movies can be great thing for a website. Major entertainment as well as commercial sites use flash in huge proportion to display animations, music and video files. Flash videos can tell a story in much better way than plain text is able to do and for advertisement purposes, present a huge visual advantage. Despite its huge popularity, Flash Objects are not used in most sites because they posed difficulties indexing by Search Engine Bots. Latest development of Google's search engines algorithm in accordance with Adobe's new searchable SWF library has made it possible to crawl and index flash files. The new technology has helped numerous sites that use flash to display interactive data on their websites. The official Google Webmaster blog states that:

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed."

Initially Search engines were not able to index or crawl the content present in Flash files as the searchbot was not programmed to understand these files but with the latest development any flash files that has content within it or has URL or link pointing to a certain web page will also be crawled seemingly with other plain text available in the website. This presented a huge problem in regards to search engine optimization (SEO) of sites and many search engine marketing firms would not even take a job that was created in flash. They could not bring satisfactory results in search engine ranking.

Though Google has made huge jump in indexing flash files, it still cannot crawl flash movies or files that are loaded using special JavaScript code or are embedded from external sources. Besides that, it cannot “crawl” flash files present in sites like Youtube.com since they only have video in it. We can consider these developments as significant boost for the community which develops websites based on flash as they can use search engine optimization with their flash files to get better ranking of their websites.

About the Author

About the Author: Jeffery Beale is a Web Design Advisor with Jazar Dezign, a Marketing Agency that provides website design. View Jeff Beale’s blog at http://www.searchenginenewswatch.com”>.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Jeff-Beale/12619

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