Search-Friendly Flash?
A couple of weeks ago, Adobe announced that it was working with Google and Yahoo! on making Flash content easier to index in search engines. Google said it was using the search-engine specific Flash player that Adobe had made available (Yahoo!’s integration is still in the works). While I think it’s great and absolutely vital that search engines continue to evolve beyond strictly text (to ensure they are providing the best possible experience for their users), I don’t think this announcement means that all the Flash content on the web will now suddenly start ranking in search results and I don’t think that Flash developers can stop thinking about search engine optimization.
How search engines work
It all goes back to how search engines work. At least for now (even with all of the advancements in the last year around universal search), the foundations of the major search engines are based on text. The web began with primarily text-only pages and the search engine algorithms were built on that idea. When people started searching for information, they searched with words. We’re used to asking for things in words, after all, and since words were what the web was made up of, the questions and answers matched up quite well. Search engines are a bit of a middleman (middlemachine?) between a searcher’s textual questions and a web site’s textual answers.
Searching continues to be text based
Sure, you might imagine other types of exchanges. I might want to upload a picture of a person and ask for all the other pictures on the web of that person. Or I might want to search through the audio of a song for a particular lyric. All of those types of searches and more are coming (and some have been tried, with varying degrees of success), but at least for now, those applications are not how the three major search engines work and not how most people search.
Over time, search engines have experimented with different elements on pages beyond simply the text itself to better understand what those pages are about. Although since these experiments are built on a text-based foundation, the experiments have also still mostly focused on text. For instance, search engines found that the text that’s in the title may be a strong indicator of the focus on the page. The textual caption under and image is likely describing that image.
How Flash fits in with text-based search engines
Now, consider Flash. Most Flash pages contain little text. Those that do could often just as easily display that text outside of the Flash components (which would make it easier for those on screen readers and mobile phones, for instance, to view the content).
With this latest innovation in crawling Flash, Google can more easily access the text in Flash, but they still can’t process it quite as well as it can HTML text because they aren’t extracting any meta data about that text. As I mentioned earlier, search engines are now storing all kinds of meta data based on the structure of the text in HTML, like if it’s in a title tag, or an H1 and so on. So Flash-based text has that disadvantage.
Provide a separate URL for each piece of Flash content
Another consideration is how the Flash application itself is constructed. This new Flash player that Adobe is making available to Google and Yahoo! helps the search engines in that it enables them to access content it never could before. The crawlers can interact with the Flash application as a user would and crawl deeper into the application to get to text that may be four or five levels deep. On first glance, this may seem similar to search engine crawlers following links within HTML sites, but it can actually be quite different.
HTML pages (generally) have unique URLs for each page. Flash applications can be constructed that way, but can also be constructed so that as you go deeper into the application, the URL doesn’t change. This can be problematic for lots of usability reasons that have nothing to do with search. For instance, the back button in the browser doesn’t work. Users can’t easily email, Digg, or otherwise share a particular section of the Flash application easily. Bookmarking only works for the beginning of the Flash app.
As you might imagine, it also causes problems in search. Sure, the search engine crawlers may now be able to get to some of that content several levels in, but they have to index all of the text under a single URL. (Also note that they likely won’t index all of the application in this case; they will execute only a certain number of interactions.)
Say information about your latest product line is available once you choose “products” from the home page, then “new” from the products page, then “coming soon” from the new page. If the URL of the application doesn’t change for each interaction, then search engines will have to index the content from the home page, products page, new page, and coming soon page all under a single URL. When a searcher looks for your latest product line, that URL may appear in the results. But once the searcher clicks over, they aren’t brought to your coming soon page, they see your home page, and may have no idea where to go from there. If you ensure your Flash app uses a different URL for each page, then the searcher can be brought directly to the page that has the right content, which should greatly improve conversion rates and lower bounce rates.
But if you take the announcement that Google can now index Flash at face value, without looking deeper, you may not realize this, and think that your single-URL Flash application is now perfectly positioned for search.
Taking back the tour
Want an example of how the statement “Google can now index Flash” isn’t the whole story?
I’ve been watching the Tour de France. It’s playing on the Versus network for the first time this year. I’d never heard of the Versus network before (since it seems to mostly show ultimate fighting cage matches, this may be because I’m not its target audience; not to mention that I wasn’t the target audience for the network under its previous name, OLN, as I think it mostly played shows about people fishing then), and the network is looking to capitalize on this potential new audience.
Versus is spending a lot of money on its Tour de France campaign “Take Back the Tour”. It has put together flashy commercials and an equally flashy website.
Versus probably would like to be found when people search for [tour de france]. The Tour de France page on the main versus.com domain shows up in the search results, but the Take Back The Tour site that they spent so money money on? Nowhere to be found.
Well, they’re spending all the money on commercials and print ads, so maybe people have been searching for [take back the tour] as well. The site does rank #1 for that query on both Google and Live (although it’s down at #8 on Yahoo!). For all three engines, even those who do the search because they saw an ad might not be sure if the takebackthetour.com listing is really the official site based on how the listing looks in the search results.
You can see that at this point, Google doesn’t see any content on the site and in fact, notes on the cached page that [take back the tour] appears only in links pointing to the page. Since it can’t extract any text, it has no way of knowing that the site is about the Tour de France.
Google still doesn’t Flash executed via JavaScript
So. What’s the problem? Google crawls Flash now and all should be well. I see at least two problems. The first is fundamental. The Flash executes via JavaScript. Google noted in their blog post that:
“Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”
They did update the post later to say that:
“For our July 1st launch, we didn’t enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We’re now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.”
Will this update help the Take Back the Tour site? Maybe not.
Can Google find any words to index?
Another big obstacle to the crawl of this site is that even if Google could get to the Flash, it would find few words to index. Nearly all of the text on the site is contained in images. The first thing you see when you go to the site is lots of words, but the only ones that seem to be text, rather than part of the image, are in the link “join the movement”.
So, once Google can access the Flash, it will be able to crawl and index those words. This design is a theme throughout the site. Links like “back” are text. Nearly everything else is in images.
Let’s pretend for a moment that they changed the Flash file so that the text wasn’t contained in images (and that the JavaScript problem didn’t exist). Would this help indexing? Yes and no.
No separate URLs can lead to a poor experience for searchers
Each time you click a link in the Flash file, you are taken to another page, but the URL doesn’t change. It stays at takebackthetour.com no matter how you navigate. That means that any text Google does pick up will be indexed under that one URL.
By clicking about three levels deep, I can find TV spots about the tour. If the site designers added some text about those TV spots, using the language of their customers, then searchers looking for [tour de france video] or something similar might see the takebackthetour.com site come up in their search results. But when they clicked through to the site, they wouldn’t see the TV spots. They would see the Flash splash page. And they would have to figure out how to navigate through the site to find the video section. Chances are that many searchers would scan the initial page that came up, not see what they were looking for and go back to the search results to find another site.
Little change for viral success
This makes for a poor user experience from search, but consider also that the creators of this campaign obviously are hoping it goes viral. If you want a site to go viral, you have to make it easily shareable. Sure, people may love the rant section or the video section or the contest, but no URL of any of these sections exists for those people to email, Digg, Twitter, Stumble, or otherwise share. A viral campaign that requires every person who shares the content to say, “go to this URL, then click ‘join the movement’, then click ‘how will you take back the tour’ is over before it even begins.
And what about accessibility? And those on the go? I watched the first night of the tour at a friend’s house. What if I had seen the commercial, wanted to check it out, and pulled up the site on my Windows Mobile Smartphone? I would have had this awesome experience:
It’s not even an accurate error message, since the first problem is that I don’t have JavaScript support.
Be smart about Flash
Clearly, a few problems still exist with Flash websites. My view is this:
- It’s important for web technology providers to think about things like accessibility and search engine optimization or those who implement those technologies will turn to other solutions. To this end, Adobe should be commended for continuing to evolve their offerings to better serve the needs of their users.
- Search engines have to continue to evolve beyond HTML as their primary goal is to provide the best possible results for searchers. They can’t rely on site owners across the web understanding what technologies are better for search. Google is clearly working on “organizing all the world’s information”, not just all the information well optimized for search engines, and this latest Flash development is an important part of that evolution.
- If you operate a business online, search is an important acquisition channel. Don’t leave such an important avenue for gaining new customers in the hands of others. Ensure that you are making it as easy as possible for search engines to find your content.
- Flash may very well be a great technology for your site, but implement it wisely.
Great post. Some folks thought this announcement was the magic bullet for Flash. Personally I don’t think anything has changed in the way website’s should work with Flash.
It boils down to the question I ask frequently. Who’s hands do you want to put the success of your site in? Your own hands (picture of hand holding hammer) or the search engine’s hands (picture of hands praying)?
Best,
Derrick
Another big name frowning on Flash SEO! Was there some secret meeting at the las SMX? What happens if Flash 10 (or 11) is 100% SEO friendly, and Google crawls the Flash site differently, taking into account the different format? That may not help rankings today or tomorrow, but should companies stay one step behind the game for SEO, one step ahead for novelty, or try and diversify the content in as many ways possible to gain traffic today and prepare for traffic in the future?
Hi Chris,
This isn’t a new stance for me. I talked about it a bit here a year ago, for instance:
http://www.ninebyblue.com/2007/07/29/the-power-of-search-ensuring-your-blog-is-crawlable/
And I talked about it even earlier when I was still at Google:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/come-see-us-at-ses-london-and-hear.html
As to your question, I think site owners should definitely continue to evolve their sites with newer technologies, but should always focus on the user experience (both in how users see and interact with their site and how they are able to find it).
Those lazy search engine programmers! If those search engine robots just integrated Javascript, Flash, Optical Character Recognition, and strong AI, they’d be able to understand that fish-on-a-bicycle network’s site no problem. Why don’t they just get their act together? (These opinions probably don’t reflect those of my employer.)
Unfortunately, the Google “soundbite” announcement will draw far more attention than your well-reasoned excellent analysis of the issue.
Vanessa thanks for sharing the valuable information.
Most of the people in the SEO industry aren’t big fans of flashy websites but every now and then come across a few. It’s good to know that G/Y will be indexing the flash to some extent.
This is a fantastic article and just the kind of information I needed to present to my team. I wasn’t aware that Google had amended it’s Javascript statement.
I do have a question, though. I know that SWFObject is useful for getting Flash content indexed, but does it have the same effect on rankings as, say, just having the text in the HTML to begin with? So, if the site’s primary goal is to rank well is it better to just use HTML in the first place instead of SWFObject or are they both equal?
I was further mulling over why this topic has inspired me to squeak up about it, and I think it’s that I’m very unhappy with the outdated technology on the web. When Windows 95 came out, we could do things with the computer that couldn’t be done at all before… editing recorded music without the unavoidable pops from tape loop splicing, for example. Not possible before. Editing out a person from a family photo. Just didn’t happen before Windows 95 (on a large scale). When Mac OS X came out, I felt the same type of techno-joy, as the things I did on the computer that previously required driver updates, arranging files, adjusting disk cache, all of the sudden “just worked”, removing the left brain obstacles from my right brain creativity.
With the birth of internet, we were back to Windows 95. Finally, creative people could move their content over a much more open medium… as long as they knew HTML. Then DHTML. Then JavaScript. Now, Actionscript. I’m pining for the point where somebody takes the development out of the web to that truly user friendly, and aesthetically organic level; so that even my mom, without being shown how, or even being told what eBay is, can post her painting for sale in auction, or so my niece can look for a data entry job without having to know that Dice is more tech oriented than Monster. I want the internet to Just Work(tm), and I see pushing through (by supporting) these crippled advances as our way of pushing through to the end result, a better internet experience for all of us.
The nit picking of Google’s ability to read Flash files is getting a little old. People seem to forget something: Google doesn’t really need to crawl Flash sites. Your reference to Versus and why it’s a poorly optimized site is a perfect example.
Versus does not care about this site being ranked by Google, it’s simple just not important to them. It’s a temporary site setup to temporarily promote their contest, text campaign, the brand, and of course the Tour. They have the budget to put money into effective traditional advertising as well as, one would assume, banner ads and other forms of PPC.
If Versus was that concerned with ranking (or any site someone builds), they would not have used Flash to build the site. Flash has its place, and with SEO ranking it’s not one of them. Note the ranking of Versus traditional, HTML site…
Also, you mention that only a small amount of text was used on the Flash file. I had to assume you were wrong, you simply cannot tell by looking at a flash file whether there’s text, or an image the way you can with HTML. The cool thing about Flash is you can embed fonts with your published movie and can achieve the same effect that you would get with an image (saving file size and making updates easier too).
I decompiled the Versus Flash file and to my surprise, ONLY images were used (so you were right). I could not find a single instance of text, not even to the text you had mentioned (kind of right
). The developers could have easily used text fields, but chose not to.
Just because a site exists in the world wide web, it doesn’t mean that Google has to crawl it and that SEO is the only way to promote it. There are wealthy businesses out there that don’t depend on Google’s free advertising for survival.
So flash… if indexed (because most of it will still be unreadable by the search engines) will add little more than a few images to a website at best.
I’m not, and most likely never will be a fan of flash but I believe the statement “Google (and Yahoo!) can now read flash” will have a whole load of “SEO” folk thinking that flash is now the way to go. Hey, just makes my job easier.
The only advantage I can see of this is that sites that are using flash navigation, with text links, will now have those links indexed.
testify testify Sister
a very good post
Hi Jrock,
Not nitpicking Google’s ability. In fact, totally agree with the direction they’re heading. My point is just to explain to those who care about being found in Google and have Flash sites where some limitations may still be.
Of course, no site should solely rely on Google for traffic. But I disagree that the use of a Flash site is proof the site owner isn’t interested in being found in search. While I worked at Google and since, I’ve talked to (at least) hundreds of site owners who built their sites in Flash and had no idea that this might limit their ability to be found in search. This post is meant to help those who don’t know these details make more educated decisions. It’s not intended to be slam Flash or Google.
Re: SWObject, I’m looking into exactly how this is now handled. Hope to have something up soon — probably in more depth on Jane and Robot.
Search-Friendly Flash?…
A couple of weeks ago, Adobe announced that it was working with Google and Yahoo! on making Flash content easier to index in search engines. Google said it was using the search-engine specific Flash player that Adobe had made available (Yahoo!’s inte…
Great post Vanessa!
While extracting more content from Flash is an advancement for Google, it’s going to be interesting to see how many Flash developers get on board in terms of educating themselves to really understand and take advantage of this new algorithm. In many ways, I see Google’s new Flash algorithm as making it even more difficult for all Flash sites to rank in results.
[...] 17th July – Vanessa Fox: Search-Friendly Flash? (Harith) Vanessa drills down into the real aspects of crawling Flash, after Google and Yahoo announced a partnership with Adobe – allowing them to crawl content in .swf files. The announcement resulted in many SEOs getting calls from their clients and managers, requesting confirmation that it’s now OK to re-create their website completely in Flash. Although some Flash elements can be aesthetically pleasing, the format will never replace simple mark-up based code such as HTML, and issues such as pagination remain unsolved. If you happen to be a Flash designer and are reading this, STEP AWAY FROM THE SWF EXPORT! Direct Link: Vanessa Fox Nude [...]
Excellent run-down! I agree that the flash crawling buzz is still largely misinterpreted. The limitations of flash and JavaScript-executed flash are still extensive. With my clients I haven’t changed my tone. If they have flash navigation, compliment it with text navigation in the sidebar or footer, and with the html sitemap.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months as more and more sites that are flash heavy report on any crawling or indexing improvements.
[...] Search-Friendly Flash? [...]
[...] Vanessa Fox: Search-Friendly Flash? [...]
There’s even another problem, and that’s Flex. Gone are the days when all text could be extracted by reading the SWF text tags. Nowadays, all meaningful text and link structure in Flex applications are usually embedded deep within object hierarchies in AS3 bytecode, which requires the ASVM to read. Perhaps that’s what Adobe is distributing to search engines?
It would be nice if Adobe/Google was clear on exactly how the crawler searches through AS3 bytecode. Does it resolve content that is made through remoting calls? Does it find content that is only accessible through mouse clicks? Does it just search through the object graph for text fields? These questions are really important for SEO.
Great post Vanessa. Been reading up on all the various opinions on Google’s ability to read flash, this one is very comprehensive. thanks
[...] digestible by search engines and can be translated to determine relevancy for textual queries. As Vanessa Fox recently pointed out, the lack of structural meta data in Flash is a real [...]
Flash is DIGESTED. Serving a dish of Flash to Google 2 times a day starts as in the old days with the most important and still in my view essential NAMING (right clicking on the SWF files BEFORE being placed on the server) of title and content info and within the file in terms of accessibility and properties. And using BITS of Flash across HTML pages – cutting the flash into bits on a single page … then the “new” power of engine digesting is enhanced. In other words you have to make a nice sauce — a nice presentation before the engines take your flash 2 times a day as a meal.
[...] it also reinforces the advice that site owners have to be aware of the limitations of technologies such as Flash. The fact is that if you want your site’s content to be found by searchers, you have to make [...]
[...] If you use Flash, make sure you’re using it in a search-friendly way. [...]
[...] Similar issues exist with Adobe technologies such as Flash and Flex. Search engines have historically had trouble crawling Flash. Last year, Adobe made a search crawler version of the Flash player available to Google so it could extract text and links, and more recently launched an SEO knowledge center, but problems remain. [...]