Comments on: Flash can now be indexed by search engines and other code

By: Nicolas GALLET

Nicolas GALLET — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:20:02 +0000

@Al : they get nothing if you give nothing.
Flash is optional. Different user experiences should be deployed to serve all users: those who can see Flash and those who don’t (example : rolex.com or nurun.com). In that case, we cannot consider text rendering as an alternative. It is rather the opposite: Flash is an alternative to text.

I’m an SEO, and really think that this “new” implementation is a bad thing: Flash contents aren’t structured as well as in HTML. Because it seems to be full text analysis, how can Flash contents be correctly interpreted/ranked by search engines ?

By: Al

Al — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:53:52 +0000

Forgot to say that the only (possibly major for this site!) problem with my method is that non-JS and non-Flash people get nothing. That’s why replacing the doc.write with real alternative text would be a good idea, but as I said google would then index both it and the flash.

By: Al

Al — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:51:53 +0000

Nope, it didn’t - I’ll replace angles by squares. Here’s the code:

[div id="flashElement"]
[script type="text/javascript"]
document.write(”This is our ‘you need a better version of flash’ spiel”);
[/script]
[noscript]
[object]
[param...]
[embed src="flash.swf" /]
[/object]
[/noscript]
[/div]
[script type="text/javascript"]
swfobject(”flash.swf”, “flashElement”);
[

By: Al

Al — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:50:44 +0000

It may still be possible to have google index the flash and use swfobject. Consider the following code:

document.write(”This is our ‘you need a better version of flash’ spiel”);

swfobject(”flash.swf”, “flashElement”);

Obviously that is grossly simplified, and the JS for “get better flash” is a bit lame. You could simply write it in the div as you may currently do, but then google will get the warning AND the flash. Everyone else will just get the warning OR the swfobject-supplied flash. Putting it in a js document.write() means that google gets its business from , non-js people get the same, and js people get either a warning about flash being old or the flash provided by swfobject.

No idea if that would work, but maybe worth a try?

(Hope my html gets entity-ised properly!)

By: Stéphane Deschamps

Stéphane Deschamps — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:11:21 +0000

@Mathieu: haha, it’s just not so real-life, the idea that people do things the right way…

@Chris:

Just making it indexable by search engines should not stop people from assuming users have the right flash version.

Yeah, but consider that Flash plugins have now been able for a while to detect they’re not up-to-date and ask you if they can update on-the-fly.

The only good reason for SWFobject was that it gave the user a choice — again, if people did it right.

By: Mahtieu 'p01' Henri

Mahtieu 'p01' Henri — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:21:33 +0000

I also have mixed feelings about this.

Regarding your note on SWFObject et al. it shouldn’t be so much of a problem if search engines do not index the .SWF file since it is supposed to be an enhancement to an accessible, and indexable, page. That is of course assuming that people do things the right way.