On Tuesday, the announcement came that content in Flash websites will now be crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo search engines, with Microsoft no doubt to follow closely behind. This is good news for photographers who’s entire website is embedded in a .swf file. Typically what those website owners had to do is create HTML content that would be displayed separately from the Flash file. This breaks one of the rules of Google optimization because any text that is on a web page should be visible to the viewer. In fact the same content was displayed in the Flash file, but the HTML rendering was masked or “cloaked” hidden from the view of the user, but not the search engines.
Cloaking has been frowned upon by many purisits and those being careful with SEO techniques as not to get their site blacklisted by the search engines. Now with a compelling and legitimized alternative to cloaking, the previous concerns are no longer an issue but, according to my friend Gabriel Paez, raises some new concerns. In many of the high end Flash websites he designs and develops for his clients, the .swf file only holds the application logic but does not actually (or rarely) contain the actual content to be indexed (which could break more Google optimizing rules) since the actual content is created dynamically from a database driven content management system on the back end. Of course you could hard code all of the content in the .swf to take advantage of the new legitimate techniques offered by Google and Yahoo, but then what becomes of the slick content management system you have that is your only way of updating your website without calling the Flash developer?
Adobe promises new tools to help with optimizing Flash websites, but the remaining questions will still cause some high anxiety and speculation until we have more details about what Adobe, Google and Yahoo are doing. The utopian view of SEO for Flash is not quite here, but lets give Adobe the benefit of the doubt, and wait to see what they can come up with.
