« Auctioning access to your PC | Main | Nokia N800 tablet, Adobe Flash Player »

July 06, 2007

Google on Flash

Google on Flash: Mark Berghausen (or perhaps Adam Lasnik), of Google's "Search Quality Team", has an essay on Flash use at their WebMaster Central blog. This is useful... the previous resource was an incomplete entry in their Webmaster info. The writer acknowledges that search engines take text as input, and so don't have much to do with richer media or timebased media. There's acknowledgment of text support: "Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing." The article discourages trickiness, cloaks and portals and hidden text and such. The author misses completely, however, the subject of how people will actually search for you -- to figure out on which plausible search terms you can compete, and optimize your text to place highly on those specific terms, rather than worrying about Google databasing every single word in the project. (I wouldn't worry about being found under the term "worry" in search engines, for instance, but should probably add text "SEO" in here somewhere so this entry can be found.) The author seems completely clueless on screenreaders over the past five years -- his argument here is actually more effective against Google Maps than Adobe Flash. I appreciate that Google has divulged a little more detail in how they plan to "organize the world's information".

Posted by JohnDowdell at July 6, 2007 08:08 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/8868

Comments

I was just talking to Geoff Stearns (author of SWFObject and Google/YouTube employee) about how we went about optimizing our Flash sites for search engines, blog post here:

http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=171

The responses he got from fellow employees seemed to indicate that what we are doing is completely kosher since there is no malicious cloaking or serving different content to spiders.

Posted by: Jason Grunsrta at July 6, 2007 02:35 PM

I think the most important part of that post is this:

"So what's an honest web designer to do? The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don't, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms."

Posted by: Geoff Stearns at July 7, 2007 12:03 PM