Hey Brian, good work on the research! > > It indexes both your HTML > > and Flash content, and makes a decision which content it will show to > > a certain visitor as a search result. > > As mentioned in my research, Google isn't attributing content in Flash > with the parent URL or as a single entity. This is still true as you > can see using Google's own example > query:http://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+deep+impact+animation&sourceid=na... > > In the results, noticewww.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/deep-impact/index-flash.html > doesn't include "alternative" content and > thatwww.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/deep-impact/index.swfis also indexed. > When swf files are indexed they are accessible to users with or > without Flash. Try the same query on your iPhone and you'll see what > I mean. When users without Flash click on swf files in search results > no progressive enhancement takes place and graceful degredation can't > happen.
This is what I see when I type in the query (both the HTML page and SWF indexing results are displayed as 2 seperate search results, however clustered together, the SWF hierarchical under the HTML page): http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/swfobject/img/google_deepimpact_20081027.gif If you just take a look at the source code of the HTML page, there is no alternative content included, so this might not be the best test case after all :-( When you read the QA on googlewebmastercentral: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html The 3 quotes under "Interaction of HTML pages and Flash" give a good indication of Google's new direction: "The text found in Flash files is treated similarly to text found in other files, such as HTML, PDFs, etc. If the Flash file is embedded in HTML (as many of the Flash files we find are), its content is associated with the parent URL and indexed as single entity." "Serving the same content in Flash and an alternate HTML version could cause us to find duplicate content. This won't cause a penalty -- we don’t lower a site in ranking because of duplicate content. Be aware, though, that search results will most likely only show one version, not both." "We’re trying to serve users the most relevant results possible regardless of the file type. This means that standalone Flash, HTML with embedded Flash, HTML only, PDFs, etc., can all have the potential to be returned in search results." > > if you only show a Flash video with no textual content Googlebot will > > probably index nothing, however if you provide descriptive alternative > > content will it show these results instead? > > Actually the opposite seems to be true in most cases I've seen. My > case study and Google's example is a Flash file at a parent URL > without descriptive alternative text content or any text content in > (X)HTML indexed in search results. In fact text content in Flash has > been associated with the (X)HTML file. That's not what I meant: if you serve a web page with 1 swf file that only shows 1 flv file and no textual content within the swf, and you serve descriptive alternative content that describes what can be seen in the video, I doubt that Google will show the blank results of the crawled swf. But then again, these many different scenarios are well worth investigating. I just fear that if you would do elaborate research now, in 6 months time the results will probably be way different, so it needs to be studied over time... An excerpt from your blog entry: http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/google-flash-seo/ "While the full impact is not yet known, these technologies will redefine how Flash sites are created, constructed, designed and, as a result, optimized." Yes and no. IMO good web authoring techniques should work now and in 5 years from now, while SEO techniques usually only stand the test of time when they overlap with good web authoring techniques. And both can influence each other. I mean, a few years ago only a handful of people were promoting techniques like progressive enhancement and the use of fallback content for plug-in content, because they totally made sense from a web authoring point of view. Only millions of authoring implementations (e.g. SWFObject, UFO) later search engine vendors have picked up this trend. And the current developments with Flash indexing will of course impact how people define content within Flash. I hope that Adobe will play an active role in this too. If the SWF format can include descriptive features, hierarchy and semantics for its textual content and links, it will offer web authors the possibility to optimize their content as can be one with HTML. Slowly things are getting more mature, it's just a process :-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SWFObject" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/swfobject?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
