Can Flash Gain Search Engine Respect?
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Search engines find Flash hard to crawl and index, but new approaches could give Flash-based sites more ranking parity with their HTML cousins.
LAS VEGAS—For Web sites based on Macromedia Flash, search engines are anything but friendly. The major crawlers used to discover content rarely dig deep into Flash, often missing pages or, worse yet, ignoring sites altogether. But a pair of Web designers detailed a new approach on Tuesday at the WebmasterWorld.com World Search Conference here to change that. They are investigating a way to abstract the content and presentation layers of Flash sites so that search engines can spider the HTML that they favor and sites can take advantage of the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash.
Click here to read about multimedia search engine Singingfishs introduction of Flash support.
But the SDK has offered limited help, Markel said. He said that Macromedia in recent months has become more involved in figuring out how to optimize Flash for search engines.
Google Inc. earlier this year appeared to begin indexing Flash using its own SDK, but that effort has appeared to be on again, off again, Markel said.
Tim Mayer, director of product management for search at Yahoo Inc., said that Yahoo does not spider into Flash content for its Web index but could once it "helps our comprehensiveness."
Multimedia sites, though, can use Yahoos paid inclusion program, Overture Site Match, to feed the content into its index.
"At this point, if youre using Flash you rarely are going to get a No. 1 listing, and thats a shame," Mayer said
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As an online reporter for eWEEK.com, Matt Hicks covers the fast-changing developments in Internet technologies. His coverage includes the growing field of Web conferencing software and services. With eight years as a business and technology journalist, Matt has gained insight into the market strategies of IT vendors as well as the needs of enterprise IT managers. He joined Ziff Davis in 1999 as a staff writer for the former Strategies section of eWEEK, where he wrote in-depth features about corporate strategies for e-business and enterprise software. In 2002, he moved to the News department at the magazine as a senior writer specializing in coverage of database software and enterprise networking. Later that year Matt started a yearlong fellowship in Washington, DC, after being awarded an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship for Journalist. As a fellow, he spent nine months working on policy issues, including technology policy, in for a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He rejoined Ziff Davis in August 2003 as a reporter dedicated to online coverage for eWEEK.com. Along with Web conferencing, he follows search engines, Web browsers, speech technology and the Internet domain-naming system.
