Flash files will be indexed by search engines July 2nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I’ll preface this post by saying I’m not a fan of flash. I think flash has a place but is often over used. I chose to label it as over used instead of abused. The abuse has yet to come, but I’ll get to that. Flash is good for displaying video’s, music and of course those browser based flash games that can suck an hour out of your life. Using flash for banners can be useful as well.
With the exception of websites devoted to TV shows, movies or other multimedia as soon as I see the “loading” screen for a website developed completely in flash I close the window. One of my biggest arguments against the use of a flash based website was the fact that search engines could not index the content and therefore suffer with lower rankings. This is no longer the case.
As of this week google announced that it now has the ability to crawl flash files and index the content. This new feature does not belong soley to google. Adobe released the technology to yahoo as well as google.
As per anything that occurs on the internet this opens new doors for abuse. Search engines will have to find a way to determine legitmate content from black hat SEO practices that include spamming hidden content in an attempt to gain higher search engine positions. You can bet right now there are people that are developing sites using this practice. I think at first they will benefit from these practices and change search engine rankings. Sooner or later the search engines will catch up with them and blacklist those websites (remove them from the index all together).
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What do the search engines say about you? February 11th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Recently I went looking for a new dentist. I pulled up my handy tool google maps, searched for a business near my house. There were about 4 different results within a few miles of my house. Google maps will show you pictures of the business (yes even if you never submitted one) website listings and reviews. The website listings often contain links to other reviewing websites. None of the dentists office has a website so I couldn’t learn much from that. However, a few had reviews.
Tags: SEO
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