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SEO, Google, and Flash

Written by: Michael Marshall

Article Overview: With the knowledge that Google indexes the text within Flash presentations, SEO professionals no longer need to resort to any of these techniques. As long as you understand how Google sees the text within your Flash presentations you can have the best of both worlds: Flash sites and indexable content!

SEO, Google, and Flash

History of SEO obstacles with Flash:

In recent years, Flash presentations have been quite a pain for search engine optimizers. The solutions implemented, although varied, have always been less than optimal for monetary and/or ranking relevance reasons (text in no-frames tags, mirror sites, cloaking, on so on.)

It was understood that apart from some links, most of the content in a Flash presentation was not directly accessible by search engine spiders and therefore not indexable. When "publishing" a Flash presentation, sometimes snippets of text would be extracted and included in the html output from the generator, but this was almost always grossly inadequate for SEO purposes.

With the knowledge that Google indexes the text within Flash presentations, SEO professionals no longer need to resort to any of these techniques. As long as you understand how Google sees the text within your Flash presentations you can have the best of both worlds: Flash sites and indexable content!


How Google indexes Flash

Have you ever used the filetype operator in Google to restrict your search? Try the following as a Google search:

"Best Free Banner Exchange Market " filetype:swf

(SWF is the file extension for Flash files)

This should bring up search results with a [Flash] indicator just before the link text for the result:

[FLASH] Join For Free Display Banners Earn Credits Your Banner Displayed ...

This brings up the actual flash file (swf), demonstrating for certain that the indexed content is not from text elsewhere on a web page in which the Flash might be embedded, but rather, directly from the flash file itself. What would be interesting to know is how much of the text inside that Flash file was accessible to Google and how much of it was actually indexed. How deep into the text of the Flash (swf) file does the spider reach and index?

Since we can't do a view source on the swf file in a browser window, it may seem impossible to answer the question for sure. However, all is not lost.

Macromedia to the rescue

Macromedia has a Flash Search Engine SDK that will give us just what we need. The SDK (Software Development Kit) includes an application named ‘swf2html’. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static library for linked library implementation. For complete functionality, see the file Readme.htm included in the SDK.

Using this tool, we can get the text ouput from the swf and see what the extractable text of any SWF file looks like. On a Windows OS, you can get to the DOS prompt and execute the swf2html application very easily and use its various command line options to generate the extractable text in the form you want. I generally use it in the following manner:

C:Mike's Stuffflash_search_sdkwindows>swf2html -o extractable_text.html flash_file.swf

This will give me the output (-o option) in the form of an html file. You can see all the possible command line options for this tool below. The readme file with the SDK as well as the FAQ section at the Macromedia site give more detailed explanation for using the tool.

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:Mike's Stuffflash_search_sdkwindows>swf2html
swf2html: Convert SWF to HTML [build 11]
Copyright (c) 2002 Macromedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

usage: swf2html [-l][-t][-o outputFile][-p prefixes][-s suffixes] inputFile

-l dumps links only
-t dumps text only
-o to specify a filename for the output
-p to specify a prefixes filter string in the form "pre1|pre2"
-s to specify a suffixes filter string in the form "suf1|suf2"
use - for inputFile if using stdin for the swf buffer

Extracted Content from my flash example (http://www.internet-marketing-analysts.com/flash_sample.html) using the Macromedia tool
(See here (http://www.internet-marketing-analysts.com/extracted_text.html) for the actual output in web page form rather than source code view below.)

If you look at the output in web page form, you will see that it is not very pretty. Nevertheless, you've got lots of SEO worthy content there and that's what we are most concerned with here. You should visit the flash presentation itself, mouse over the text, and click the links in the presentation so you can be familiar with the SWF file it in its "native" form before reading further.

How does Google see it?
We can't know for certain (since we don't know whether they use Macromedia's tool or their own) but Macromedia's tool can give us a good approximation. One of the things that becomes clear fairly quickly is the fact that how (and where) certain text gets extracted depends on what you do with that text in the Flash presentation. In the output, some text seems to be repeated on multiple lines and one portion of it even appears invisible since the font color comes out white. This is just a side effect of the conversion/extraction tool.

As long as text is static in the Flash movie, it does not appear as duplicate instances in the extracted output. When certain kinds of motion are associated with text, the resulting extracted output will contain duplicate occurrences of that text.

1. Some animation involves converting text into a symbol and then using multiple copies of that symbol to achieve the desired effect.
2. Other kinds of animation involve converting text into a symbol and then simply manipulating the single instance of the symbol to achieve the desired effect.

1) Movie Clips with multiple copies of a symbol
Examples in my Flash presentation:

* The mini-explosion effect triggered by mouse over with the "Home" and "About"
* The change in color of the "management team" sub-menu button

Because the motion associated with this text requires duplicate copies of the text in the movie clip, we get duplicate occurrences of the text in the extracted output.
2) Motion Tweening not requiring multiple copies of a symbol
Tweening comes from the words "in between".
With Tweening you can go from one keyframe to another and specify changes in the animation and let the Flash program create the frames in between.

Examples in my Flash presentation:

* the paragraphs that fade into view when you click "About Us"
* the sliding bullet points which activate when you click "Our promise" under "Executive Forum"

Although these portions of text have motion associated with them, they do not result in multiple occurrences in the output from the extraction process.

Keeping in mind these different effects in the extracted output can have a bearing on what kinds of motion/animation you associate with various portions of text. If you don't want the text duplicated in the extracted output, don't use the kinds of animation that involve duplicate copies of that text's corresponding symbol.
How much does Google see?
A simple test will show us how much of the text in my Flash presentation can be seen (or extracted) by Google. Perform an exact search (and use the filetype operator) on some text that appears at the top of the html output from Macromedia's tool and then perform a similar search for text that appears at the bottom. Try similar searches on text that appears in the middle as well if you really want to be sure.

1. A search for text found near the top of the extracted output from swf2html:

"Internet Marketing Analysts" filetype:swf

Click here (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22Internet+Marketing+Analysts%22+filetype%3Aswf) to see the search results for Internet Marketing Analysts

You will see that indeed this snippet of text from the Flash presentation is found in Google! You will also notice that in the search result description the text preceding and the text following our target search phrase is exactly the text that precedes and follows the same snippet in the extracted output from swf2html.

2. A search for text found near the bottom of the extracted output from swf2html:

"or otherwise related Theme Master" filetype:swf

Click here (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=%22or+otherwise+related+Theme+Master%22+filetype%3Aswf) to see the search results for "or otherwise related Theme Master"

You will see that indeed this snippet of text from the Flash presentation is also found in Google! Again, you will also notice that in the search result description the text preceding and the text following our target search phrase is exactly the text that precedes and follows the same snippet in the extracted output from swf2html.

3. You should also notice that the link text in the Google results page is identical to the first couple of lines of text at the very top of the text extracted by swf2html! So now you know how this will affect your link text in Google's results pages.

By the way, performing these searches without the filetype operator will produce similar results. A searcher does not have to specify filetype:swf in their search in order for content in your Flash presentation(s) to show up in the search engine results pages.



With these tools, you can now manipulate text in your Flash Movies more carefully and make your content easily indexable, search engine friendly and, with a little more skill, even optimized!.

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Article Tags: Flash, Flash file, Flash presentation, Flash presentations, Google, Macromedia, Macromedia Flash, search engine optimizers



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