It looks as if Adobe has given sight to blind search engines. Previously if web designers of blogs, web sites, etc. coded their site in flash, they would have to give up the ability to have their site indexed by the Google giant, and their whipping boy Yahoo!
Now bloggers, web developers and social networks will be able to remake their sites into “one big eye candy,” without fear on missing out from search engine traffic (aka “Google juice”).
(Adobe Developer Center) Adobe is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe. […]
Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. 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.
While Google and Yahoo! are really excited about this, one may wonder why Adobe decided to give Microsoft Live Search the cold shoulder (at least regarding the launch of this new feature).
The answer probably lies in the fact that 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.
(hat tip: TechCrunch)
