Viralogy

There was a time when search engines and Flash based websites were the worst of friends. Wherever Flash went, search engines would ignore them, but then something changed. Search engines had a change of heart. Through the help of Google and development by Adobe, Flash and search engines are slowly becoming the best of friends. While Flash still has a ways to go as far as search engine optimization best practices, the fact remains that no longer do website developers and companies have to be afraid of Flash.

The Problems and Solutions

Problem I: Indexing the Invisible

One of the biggest problems that Flash presented was how to index something that was essentially invisible to search engine crawlers. The problem was that if you clicked on the source code of Flash content, you wouldn’t be able to see the information and text that was previously viewable since the content/text was wrapped up in the SWF files. With crawlers built primarily to read and index HTML, by building a Flash based website, one was giving search engines little to no content to index.

Aesthetically, building a  site in Flash could make a site look amazing, but when it came to be indexed, it was like search engine suicide.

The solution: Adobe’s headless Flash Player (aka. Ichabod)

Released in 2008, Adobe’s headless Flash Player, also known as ‘Ichabod,’ allowed Google and Yahoo! search engines to dig deeper into the context. Adobe is able to do this by changing the way the way the content is played so that it is able to be indexed by crawlers.

Problem II: Can You Link Back To It?

Another area that previously posed many problems for search engines was the difficulty in linking back to the Flash content on sites. As fore mentioned, content was essentially invisible which meant that index the content and linking to it was impossible.

Thanks to new tools that have been developed specifically to address this problem, sites are able to now link back to the different Flash states on their site.

This is extremely valuable to e-commerce sites in particular that rely heavily on sales from their main websites which are frequently built in flash for visual appeal.

Example: Diesel.com

This is an example of how an e-commerce website like Diesel is now able to use Flash content to not only create a visually appealing site, but also now able to have each and every item shown above have there own unique link.

As you can see, the item that was previously highlighted on the Flash page has its own unique link when a customer clicks on it.

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Similar to how websites are built around maximizing their visibility and readability through search engine best practices for HTML, we must start developing best practices for Flash based sites as well. Now that Flash and search engines are best friends, perhaps its time that you considered incorporating Flash into your site.