Google and Flash

Back in July Google announced an important change (Google learns to crawl flash), for years before Flash has been a closed book to its spiders. Content written in Flash was totally invisible and Google simply ignored it so it never featured in the search results. In the early days it was quite common for interactive sites to be written totally in Flash meaning that entire sites were simply missing from the index.

Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML based webpages – much of what can be created in Flash is still not indexable by Google. In the search results Google is focused on text and this is what it looks for in Flash files – it has added the ability to follow links and index snippets of text. This is a good thing and a step in the right direction but a far cry being able to consider Flash content as search engine friendly.

The are many great reasons to use Flash but it is important that users without Flash are still considered and for the time being I would recommend counting Google as a user without Flash. Flash can be used very effectively but giving a static HTML alternative is a must.

Sites built by Mando Group that incorporate Flash use a method called SWFobject which allows Flash content to be overlaid on standard HTML. This is great because it gives the best of both worlds offering dynamic content to those users with Flash and a normal HTML site to those without (this includes mobile devices which using CSS can be given a mobile friendly version). The search engines index the HTML which in terms of text and images is a replica of the Flash. The one hard a fast rule of Search Engine Optimisation is to present the same content to search engines as you do to users so it is vital that the HTML is a faithful representation of the Flash. As long as this rule is followed SWFobject is the best way to make a Flash site search engine friendly and accessible to a wide range of users.

Time for SEO

Well it is about time I wrote a post on this blog about Search Engine Optimisation. I though I would start with some of the changes that are happening in the search engine world.

People often make one search after another and until now search engines have treated these as unique individual searches however this is starting to change. A great example is if you search for Spain you get the following (Click on the images for a larger view):

Nothing too exciting there it looks just like the results we have been getting for the past five years or so. Now comes the fun part. I follow this up with a search for flights and get the following results:

You can see in the results that have been returned by Google that the a significant number of flights are to Spain or Spanish cities. Not only in the sponsored adwords were this was first appeared but in the main results as well. Interesting times for SEOs.

What does this mean? Well it is effectively an encouragement for us all to start optimising for longer tail searches especially as the second search really became "Spain Flights"

The second area is a little more conjecture. Semantic search has been talked about for many years now but with Yahoo's announcement a couple of months back that it is running trials it is time to start considering what impact this may have on the world of SEO. Semantic search looks at the meaning of the words that the user is searching for and aims to return appropriate results e.g. TV, Television, Used car, second hand car. The similarities are close enough that they should really lead to the same sorts of pages but at the moment they don't. Why? Because seos have optimised different sets of pages for these terms. This area of search is one to watch because it is sure to mean big changes in the world of seo when the algorithms start to factor in the meaning of searches not just keyword matching.

Mando Group Ltd - rodney_riley

Google and Flash

Time for SEO