I hope this information from the source helps to process information and mis information found on this issue. While Adobe has created some new processes on Flash many of the existing flash sites will not work as they will need to be redone with the new program, I wonder who will pay for this?? BZ and others should provide this upgrade free of charge as they have been telling dealers they have found a solution for this issue for years which is misleading as it is only true on the splash or certain pages (maybe). The dealer actualy loses the effectiveness on their bulk of their site and additional pages.

MS has developed a great solution which I have posted a few months ago: Microsoft has developed a competitor to Flash called Silverlight, which (before today) was more search engine friendly than Flash.

While Microsoft’s apparent from first access will give more power to the guys and girls at Google, Adobe’s assistance may help bloggers seeking fancier layouts via flash, without having to sacrifice invisibility from the never sleeping web crawlers.

However with all this attention on Flash ETC why waste the time when Video Streaming is making hugh inroads and will allow the dealers to use existing video footage supplied by the manufacture's to promote the products and services??? at a fraction of the cost?? They spend millions of dollars to produce this footage and few dealers take advantage of this, they would rather spend $$$ money on Flash and other fancy toys / tools which makes little to no sense with todays economic climate.

mitch, don't be such a negative nancy. i follow everything you've said and even disagree with most of your second itemized tirade. let's engage in a dialog instead of characterizing and dividing each other.

"What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO."
"If you care ... you ought to get busy writing content ..."

come on, i'm not going to let you get away with that.

Did I miss out on some study proving that car shoppers/buyers prefer FLASH websites?

Hmm... on second thought, who cares! Those tachometer loading pages are so cool!

This change means very little to the sites in our industry... BZ and other vendors have been plugging keywords in (some legitimate, some not-so-legitimate) as alternative HTML for years, which works just as well as this will for them. They'll get as much mileage out of this new development as they've been getting out of their current tactics, which is to say, not much.

#1. Linearization. No web developer in this industry knows what that is, or what it means to Google. Flash has allowed these vendors to come up with some disgustingly non-linear content layouts, and now those developers will have even less reason to grasp the idea of linearization and the value it has for spiders AND users.

#2. What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO. The biggest deciding factor in your site's search presence is how many inbound links you have, what level of quality the links are, and how those links describe your site. This is another aspect of SEO that no web developer understands in this business, as evidenced by the total ignorance of the canonicalization strategy when building a site. The only reason you see noticeable changes to the SERPs when you change your site's content is because our industry has little competition for most keywords. If you care about site content and how it relates to search presence, you ought to get busy writing content that people will link to rather than writing content you think spiders like to read.

#3. On second thought, someone should be paying me for this information. That's all you get. Spinning wheel animations and flashing headlights for everyone.

A website isn't just about ranking in search engines - it is a very personal thing that brands you and excites your customer base. It is a marketing tool, and indexing in search engines is only a small part of it....albeit an important part.

I'm a HUGE fan of flash! I love the creativity it inspires and the enhanced abilities it gives over GIF's. I think flashing headlight roll-overs are cool (don't need a full flash video for that though), and I even like the carousel Mr. Metter put on Mileone.com - it is cool looking.....what do you think Jeff? [haha].

On the other hand, Flash can be over-done and absolutely destroy your indexing if not used in small doses.

Someone made a good point about spiders taking the path of least resistance. I'm not sure how true that statement is, but it sure sounds like human nature to me and I think those spiders are still programmed by humans. Maybe that's just my weird logic.

I think it is great that there will be some flexibility in the future, but I will remain somewhat traditional with CSS, HTML, and the other indexable languages as long as I can still be creative with them. Flash will continue to play a small part in image slideshows and videos in the meantime.....and I'll still be learning how to use Flash CS3.

Indexing of Flash is great... but it doesn't change the overriding goal of the website... this is not an issue unique to auto... see what the heavyweights in other industries are saying are the true issues about Flash + websites as part of a total ecommerce execution.

Hi,

NOT ALL FLASH FILES WILL BE INDEXED. SO DON'T GO CRAZY
LIKE A KID IN A CANDY STORE!!!

There might be some confusion so here is a link explaining;


All the best,

Pete from Chicago

ooops Link Below...

CS said :

---not true if you're talking about this same site. the reason the words aren't visible on the page is because they are part of the meta information and not the body content.---

Body Text From The Site discussed

----- Lagrange - Atlanta - Columbus | New, Used - Preowned Car, Truck and SUV Dealership | Bill Johnson Motors Pontiac Buick Cadillac GMC | Georgia -----

Verbatim of the the title tag and combination of the keyword stuffed meta tags, that coupled with a Google bomb link campaign may be all that is needed to get the site to rank.

CS said

----"If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed."

if you want to make that bet i might know how to get the manual review -----

Game on.. We can agree on the terms, just contact me from the link above.

Search engines take the path of least resistance period. Flash currently isn't that path, and will not be for a while.

i revisited this topic to correct some misinformation. the site used an example here, bill johnson motors, is not cloaking.

paul said

"Anytime you show the search engine something different than what you are showing human eyes it is unethical in the eyes of many."

true.

"It is cloaked content point blank."

not true if you're talking about this same site. the reason the words aren't visible on the page is because they are part of the meta information and not the body content.

"Here is how the spiders see the site he referenced above:"

and that is exactly how all users see the site through a text only browser.

"If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed."

if you want to make that bet i might know how to get the manual review

Richard,
In the example he gave have you looked at this?

It shows the search engine that the site contains information about GMC Dealers in Atlanta and Columbus when none of the content displayed on site is relevant to either location directly other than close proximity. I could not even find those terms used anywhere on the site.

If it were manually reviewed I would lay money at 5-1 it would be deindexed. That is an old school black hat technique.

They might as well have used Markov chain generated content. Just as unethical just a little easier to detect.

Anytime you show the search engine something different than what you are showing human eyes it is unethical in the eyes of many. It is cloaked content point blank.

Then again I am also of the opinion as soon as the search engines start worrying about my business model I will start worrying about theirs. -- From affiliate marketing

Long Live Google Bombing!!!!!

Paul,

Regarding your comment "Showing the search engines one thing and the surfer another is exactly what Jeff meant by "gray hat", I think, in his statement above."

Depending on what you are showing them, it may be black hat or it may be gray hat. Some people may also construe white hat seo as gray hat or even black hat depending on their knowledge of SEO.

What I would like to know is what Jeff is referring to with his statement and why he deems the practices to be gray hat.

this development only distances google further from their competitors, and isn't a game changer for me or how i will do things this year or next year.

there are lots of computers out there that are still stuck on the default msn/live.com home page because their owners are none the wiser.

people in the know, like everyone reading this website, are searching far more often than joe schmoe with his default microsoft search engine. google's marketshare is flying high, but google users are searching far more often than live users.

i design sites for firefox and opera in mind, too. you can't just ignore a chunk of the pie because one avenue looks awesome and is easier compared to the alternatives.

ps thanks for the mention, joe.

Paul,

I have to agree and disagree with your statement. I agree that it is never a good idea to spam the search engines, however there is a place for this.

Google looks at whether content is relevant to your website and whether you use keywords excessively. When you start adding content to your page that is off topic just to get traffic you get in trouble. When you use keywords too much and you get in trouble. Both these are considered SPAM.

All I say is that you could use FLASH to assist in SEO. I can see it working great on a landing page where I do not want the visitors to drown in the text but I want them to convert with a form. You simply add Flash with relevant content and without spamming keywords and it will help getting you placement and Google will not ban you since people get to where they want to go.

The simple rule for Google is: Are visitors getting where they want to get. Isn't that what search engines are for? Don't dissappoint them and you will not fall out of grace. If all web designers would be honest, Google would be out of business.

----So I think I will make a little image rotater flash app, with tiny little buttons (1 pixel big or something) so no actual people will click it, but the bots will and thus read all the text. Kinf of what people already do with the noframes tags and text behind other content through iframes.---

The same theory as hidden pixels, doorway pages, hidden text and cookie stuffing. Not a novel idea and against acceptable standards.

Showing the search engines one thing and the surfer another is exactly what Jeff meant by "gray hat", I think, in his statement above.

Here is how the spiders see the site he referenced above:


All of the hidden text on that page does not represent the actual flash content. It is keyword stuffed deception used only for SEO.

What is nice though is if the G were to every take notice of this the footprint left by the vendors that use these types of techniques will make it easy for them to deindex this stuff then they get to start over from square one.

Jeff,

According to Adobe's website, SWF files were already being indexed it was simply the dynamic content not being indexed.

Read this:

"Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies."

I agree that Flash will still have lots of negatives including the problem of directly linking to the content you want. If you make a flash application that displays multiple content pages, you have to remember that Google and Yahoo will index the text, but throw it all together as one page. That means that simple HTML is still better since you can optimize each page for very specific keywords.

Now, I am thinking that since this is a new way of indexing, some webmasters are going to use the flash files for a way of optimizing their site. Just think for a minute how much text you can hide on a page without irritating your customer. Now with a flash app on that page you can hide a bunch of relevant text in there.

So I think I will make a little image rotater flash app, with tiny little buttons (1 pixel big or something) so no actual people will click it, but the bots will and thus read all the text. Kinf of what people already do with the noframes tags and text behind other content through iframes.

Anybody think it is worth a shot?

Jeff,

Can you expound on your comment "some "gray hat" techniques some of the flash website vendors have been saying for years that they were able to get their websites indexed"

Wondering what exactly you meant by this...

There are some good tricks of the trade out there when handling Flash and SE bots. Without totally geeking out, the best way to load Flash is through JavaScript or AJAX, but it should load in such a way that it is replacing text and links that do exactly what the Flash does.

Of course, Flash should still be avoided where ever possible, and never used for navigation or content display. Google is going to be able to read your flash, but what good does that do if the content you want is burried in a Flash file that you will still have to manually navigate to from a SERP link.

Chip-

On the flip side of this, Google now has a "Skip Intro" link to take googlers right to the content page and blow by the flash landing page.

Joe

references:

Jeff -

Good question posed...dealers need to (continue to) stay away from excessive/obtrusive use of flash applications.

Keep the site simple, provide easy navigation & focus on converting visitors for the desired call to action.

Most website providers haven't been able to optimize organically using standard site platforms - don't expect your new "flash" based site to magically appear on page 1 of Google. (I'm sure someone will be told this)

Eric

My biggest complaint is that it is not playing well with roboform yet. Then again I have not looked for a fix yet either,

ctrl+t will do just fine. I am a big fan of shortcuts too, just do not know all of them.

I would like to know how I can get rid of the download window if someone can help me out with this.

Thanks

You can download an add-on called "new tab button on tab right" to get that half-opened tab thing you're talking about. Call me a peacekeeper