A small revolution in the world of referral? Adobe, Google and Yahoo said they had worked jointly to the evolution of Flash technology and the development of new search algorithms to go index textual content and hyperlinks contained within achievements in Flash. So far, the Flash remained mostly sealed referencing, and publishers of Web sites who wanted to enjoy this environment allowing animations and integration of multimedia content should make a cross on their presence in search engines, at least to develop a second version, this time in HTML, their windows on the Web. The impermeability of the robots search engines was, with the problems posed in terms of interoperability, one of the main criticisms made to the Flash technology.
The change should give. At Google, it indicates to be able to index and therefore reference, “all the text that users can see when they interact with a Flash file.” Web addresses (URLs) can also be discovered and followed by robots engine index. Various limitations remain, however: for example, Google will not detect with precision images, will not know index Flash content called by a code JavaScript and will not be able to associate an external resource, such as a piece of HTML page or an XML document, the Flash file that is being indexed. Finally, bi-directional texts (for example involving English or a French language is written from right to left as Hebrew or Arabic) problem arise. Adobe explains that he provided to Google and Yahoo a special version of its Flash player, so that their indexing robots will be able to navigate within a Flash application. A SWF file is “executed the same way it is read by the Flash player integrated into the browser,” said the editor, but the content text and links should be thanks to him automatically returned to the robots. “These improvements do not require any specific action on the part of Web designers and webmasters,” says Google. The Flash content will be indexed automatically, without the need to make any changes to the code. At Google, the changes would be immediately apparent, Yahoo has yet to carry out the updating of its engine.
Jul 01