A couple Flash issues
Now that the commercial browsers (MSIE and Opera) have had to implement “click to activate” barriers on flash controls, the Flash Satay method of embedding Flash animation into webpages is much less desirable. The deconcept blog has the best Standards Compliant alternative, called SWFObject (formerly called FlashObject. Adobe PR and Legal don’t communicate, it seems. Bunch of idjits.) According to decomcept, “SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.”
On the SEO front, it seems that some inroads have been made with Search Engines indexing links within Flash files, though they will still not be indexed as easily or as well as other sites, since the text associated with them seems to be “jumbled”, and link text loses its importance and association because of this. The spiders do seem to, however, follow the url embedded in the Flash, at least there is (slightly conflicting) evidence Googlebot and the MSNbot have, though there was also some speculation that a gmail link could just as easily led to an indexing of the mentioned page. The jury is still out on whether the YahooBot is following suit. So the bottom line is that if you want good indexing with the boost up that good anchor text will give, you still need static links somewhere on the pages where Flash is used, but I can see the day coming when either Adobe improves text handling so indexing happens more easily, OR (and much more likely) Google et al. tweak the spiders to be smarter in handling Flash content.
Technorati Tags: Standards Compliant Flash Embedding, Flash SEO
