Flash & SEO Together at Last! Sort of...

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Adobe has rolled out a Search Engine Optimization Technology Center to help designers ensure that search engines can crawl and index their rich Internet applications (RIAs) and SWF content.

For as long as I can remember, Flash and SEO have gone together like oil and water - but that is definitely changing. In an effort to make SWF files a first-class citizen in the world of searchable Web results, Adobe has been recently working with search engines to make SWF content more searchable. The information resource released may help some designers overcome the inherent challenges with flash and SEO immediately.

Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application - almost as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology runs a SWF file in a similar way the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser. It returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user.

There is a handy SEO checklist for RIAs available in the resource center, released yesterday. It covers how to integrate search into the planning stages and production cycles designers encounter when developing RIAs.

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Flash & SEO Together at Last! Sort of...