Google Uses Adobe to Improve Crawling of Flash Content
11:11 pm in Other Search Stuff by Will Fleiss
“Our entire site is flash…How do we SEO our site?” This is a common inquiry of many clients. Walking the fine line between cloaking by providing a mirror description of the flash in html has always been the response.
Google has begun to use the Macromedia Adobe Search Engine SDK tool to extract textual content from Flash files. In Stephan Spencer’s recent interview with Matt Cutts, Google engineer and director of their webspam team, Cutts said the following:
It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the search engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers. So, my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that search engine SDK tool to pull out the text.
Cutts goes on to encourage Flash users to use the Adobe SDK tool to determine if your Flash is readable. So, it sounds like they aren’t quite there in regards to being able to read Flash content as easily as HTML, but they are heading in the right direction. Read some more of Spencer’s articles to get a better understanding of the topic: Flash alternatives blessed by Google, Progressive Enhancement is Good for SEO.
