I’ve just read via the AXNA that Adobe, Google and Yahoo! worked together to allow SWF searchability. My first thought was ‘finally they made it’ 🙂
But while reading the FAQ I’ve been a little disappointed by how this indexation seems to happen:
[…]The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs a SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet 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[…]
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[…]All of the extracted information is indexed for relevance according to Google and Yahoo!’s algorithms. The end result is SWF content adding to the searchable information of the web page that hosts the SWF content, thus giving users more information from the web to search through[…]
So I’m afraid that it means that there will be absolutely ‘semantic’ information on the indexed tag. Is this text a title, a paragraph or an image caption? Does this mean that the SEO effort we have to do on SWF are only based on text and keywords?
If you have text with an Alpha of 0 but that have a tween, will it be indexed?
I’m very happy that A_G_Y are working to offer a better indexation and searchability of SWF but as far as I understand it, they are completely missing the SEO point here.
What do you think?
Ahmet