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A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference held in 2004.
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Macromedia Flash and other non-HTML formats can pose problems for search engines, unless you take appropriate steps to
optimize the content. "Search engines were originally built to index and serve HTML documents," said Tim Mayer, Vice
President of Web Search at
FAST." Now the web has become more diverse in content types, knowing how to treat Flash and
other types of content has become more important for search engines."
"These other content types present different challenges to the search engines," Mayer continued. "For example, Flash files
generally contain too little text whereas PDF documents contain too much text. The technology to include differing content
types and score them appropriately will become even more important as new areas in web search become more important -- such
as real time data which will provide the challenge of lacking inbound links."
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Search Engines and Flash
Flash is the leading vector graphics technology for creating design-focused web sites. Over 98 percent of Internet users can
view Flash content with the
Flash player software already installed in their browsers. Over 490 million people use the
Flash player.
Gregory Markel, Founder/President of
Infuse Creative, an entertainment and technology consulting company, discussed issues
related to search engine visibility and Flash sites. "The good news is that
FAST Search and
Google can follow embedded links within the [Flash] files," he said.
FAST built its Flash indexing capabilities using the Macromedia's
Flash search engine software developer's kit (SDK). The
SDK was designed to convert a Flash file's text and links into HTML for indexing.
"Not all search engine spiders have the ability to crawl or index Flash, he said. "As far as I am able to determine, Google
has not included the Flash-SDK setup for indexing, like FAST. But Google can follow embedded links."
Markel warned that the Macromedia's SDK solution is far from perfect. "All it does is it takes whatever [content] is there,
and converts it to an HTML version. But the converted HTML doesn't include anything you actually need to do well in the
search engines. No title tags, alt tags, body text, etc. SDK is a step in the right direction, but has a long way to go."
"One of the big problems with Flash content is that it's very hard to find," stated Tim Mayer. "We have a lot of Flash
content in the FAST index, though I've rarely come across a Flash file, myself, in the main search results."
One of the reasons for the paucity of optimized Flash files is that the search engine industry hasn't adopted SDK as the
standard, explained Mayer. "The SEOs out there don't know that we're actually going to index their files," he said, "so
they don't prepare them in an optimized way (for the SDK). This will change as more search engines adopt this."
Mayer recommended that webmasters restrict the text to what they want indexed. For example, making the "skip intro" a
graphic file is better than making it a text link. "Keep what you want as indexable as text," said Mayer. "Make what you
don't want as Flash graphics. We will also take out links from Flash sites and follow them."
Multimedia files and Search Engines
Few search engines provide search for audio and video file formats. Currently,
AltaVista,
FAST Search, and
Singingfish
support the following multimedia formats: Windows Media (Windows Media Encoder), RealMedia, MP3, and Quicktime.
Multimedia content can provide a better user experience in some industries.
"Multimedia content enables an immersive and emotive user experience beyond text-based content," said Ken Berkun, Founder
and VP of Strategy at
Singingfish. "A 30 second music clip is a strong advertisement for a CD."
When you create a multimedia file, you have the opportunity to give it metadata. "Give each file a title, copyright stream,
author, description, and keywords, said Berkun. "Every single one of these medias have these fields."
"You would be surprised at how little that's done," continued Berkun." The most popular titles in our database is the
default - nothing. People spend thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on the production and don't even take
the time to add a title."
In addition to having metadata in the multimedia file, Berkun also advised to have actual content on the HTML page that
contains the file. Include accurate anchor text and an around multimedia files. And make sure that your entire web site is
spiderable.
"Singingfish does spider HTML sites with multimedia," he said. "We handle frames pretty well, but we've had mixed results
with JavaScript. We can't handle Flash, although we hope to get to it someday."
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