Flash and the Search Engines – Can’t We All Just Get Along?

On July 1 Adobe issued a press release announcing their work with the search engines regarding advances in recognizing dynamic web content and RIAs (rich Internet applications).

According to the release, Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

Well, that sure is interesting but how real is it? Flash has long been a serious bone of contention between web designers and search marketers. While designers love to incorporate Flash (which I personally don’t understand, especially those awful intro pages that have helped to create the most used call to action on the ‘Net – Skip Intro) search marketers are constantly facing the task of helping a site owner figure out how to undo everything so the site can be found.

The bulk of the release concentrates on the intentions of Google to make the world better by recognizing flash content and indexing it accordingly. In fact, they make it sound like they already do it.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Interestingly enough earlier in the release Adobe was a little less emphatic in just how far along this whole process is. David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe states “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

So which is it? Is it already being done (Google’s take) or being significantly improved to broaden the availability (Adobe’s take)? Gotta love PR. Both points of view presented in nearly the same breath with different takes on the main subject of the release.

Funniest part of all of this is the fact that Yahoo! plays the bottom feeder of the search world even in this situation. Sean Suchter, VP of Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering says “Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. “ A future update? Since Yahoo! has a tough enough time figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up it seems a search update for them is almost an oxymoron.

Anyway, hopefully there will come a day when this idea reaches beyond the realm of press release and becomes reality. Now that WOULD be a real advance.

SMB Takeaway - While Flash is great for design it is still not search engine friendly. Just because Adobe and Google issue a press release doesn’t mean this issue is resolved, it just means there is a press release regarding the possibility of it being done in the near future. Reading between the lines, this whole thing sounds like bunk.

Thanks and have a great day!