http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/ It was announced recently that Google will now be crawling .swf Flash files more efficiently. This could be viewed as a major technological step-forward. However, is this good or bad for Search? en-gb Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:07:02 +0000 2008 15 The trouble with using noscript is that they can easily be abused so i can't see how they would ever be taken seriously by any search engines. http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-7 http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-7 Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:04:56 +0000 Well David, you are absolutely right when you say that noscript can be - and indeed often is - abused by spammers, and I can easily see why it would seem natural that search engines would simply ignore any content within noscript or noframe tags. Hiding content within these tags is much the same as cloaking content in any other way and, of course, search engines actively try to combat this kind of spam. Google's Search Quality group has been inviting webmasters to report sites which cloak in this way since update Jagger, back in 2005 (www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/#comment-1475). That said, Googlebot is hungry for content. Well structured noscript which provides textual content for users, including robots, helps the search engine to provide a more comprehensive set of relevant results. The examples given by the Google Webmaster Help Center (www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355) of ways to expose rich media files to visitors who are unable to view that content are alt text and noscript tags. Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer on the Google Webmaster Central team, speaking in an interview for a MarketingSpeak podcast (www.marketingspeak.com/audio/maile-ohye-interview.mp3), stated that Flash should be incorporated as a complement to a text-based page or website. She went on to explain that offering a Flash and a non-Flash version of a site was not only confusing to users, but also bad for SEO, spreading PageRank thinly across the two sites and diluting link juice, so that neither version performs well. An additional consideration is that a Flash site which cannot be bookmarked, as with framed websites, severely impacts any deep linking. '"Progressive enhancement," which relies on "noscript" tags, is an approach to making Flash more search engine friendly. Maile confirmed that Google looks at the content within "noscript" tags, but be careful to mirror accurately the Flash-based content you include within the noscript tags or it will look like cloaking to Googlebot.' Matt Cutts, head of the Google webspam team confirmed, in August last year, that Google had switched to the Adobe SDK tool to extract textual content from Flash (www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/matt-cutts-interview), which improved the search giant's ability to compare the content of an .SWF file with that of the noscript content. This ties in nicely with previous comments Matt had made on his blog 'Google does a pretty fine job of handling text noscript/noframes so that it doesn't cause problems in scoring.' Hopefully the integration of Adobe's Flash Player technology (www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200806/070108AdobeRichMediaSearch.html) into Google's new algorithm should only improve its ability to filter noscript spam. Webmasters should continue to limit their use of Flash to provide areas of media rich content within a text based site. For the moment Flash parsing is not a replacement for plain HTML and, with some mobile technology lagging behind the massive boom in mobile internet access, lower file sizes and cleaner textual page content is good for your users as well. http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-9 http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-9 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:46:24 +0000 Good point, in regards to noscript and the introduction of parsing flash. I wander how they handle noframe tags or if its done as well as the noscript tag. Can Google semi-understand the content in an iframe and attempt to analyse it against the noframe content in a similar fashion? PS. Tried using David as my name again and I couldnt as it said there was a user already with that name. http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-10 http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-10 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:30:42 +0000 Google absolutely have the technology to read content in an iframe and compare it against noframe content, should they choose to do so, although it is likely that a page would need to have noframe content which was likely to trip a filter in the first instance. Be careful using noframe - if the framed content is indexed and is replicated in the noframe content then you are likely to have duplicate content issues, quite aside from your deep linking problems. If you absolutely must use frames (and there are occasions where they can be used to try and cut down on duplication where a large piece of content is required across many pages, for example legal text or so on) be very careful to plan your REP appropriately. http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-11 http://blog.lbi-netrank.co.uk/blog/to-flash-or-not-to-flash/#comment-11 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:52:58 +0000