You may have heard that websites built in Flash or as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are invisible to search engines and are not a great idea for search engine optimization (SEO). This is not entirely true as sites which are built properly may enable search engines to reach a great deal of their content. However, this usually requires that the developer really knows what they are doing and may require special coding just for the search engines – even that is not a guarantee that search engines can reach everything (or anything depending on the content).
Today, Adobe (the makers of Flash and many other RIA products) announced that they are working with search engines to make the content in Flash and RIAs more visible to searches (or indexing). Yippie! Let’s code all our websites in beautiful Flash, right?
Well, hold on. The problem is much more complex than just working to get the content searchable (which in itself is quite complex). As Hank Williams discusses, the way RIAs are created inherently makes the information in them very difficult to display to a search engine. He uses the example of Microsoft Word where the type of information that is available to search engines is the menus and what is in the menus, which is not particularly useful. Much of the information that is available in RIAs requires a person to make some type of interaction (choosing to see all the red shoes for example), which then displays a specific set of information – very difficult to reproduce for a search engine and even more difficult to make meaningful to a search.
This is certainly the first step in having information in RIAs available to search engines, but there is much work yet to be done. Flash and RIAs can be used to provide great customer experiences, just don’t bet on them to provide search engine traffic to your website (yet).
More coverage:
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog – Improved Flash indexing
- TechCrunch – Once Nearly Invisible to Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found and Indexed
- ReadWriteWeb – Adobe Makes Flash Searchable – The Holy Grail of Website Usability?
Technorati Tags: Adobe, Flash, RIA, rich internet applications