s4.blog

Adobe Opens Up Flash to be Indexed by Search Engines: Thoughts on the Implications

Chris Olberding — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:16:00 -0700

As covered on Slashdot and elsewhere, Adobe annouced today that it has provided technology to search giants Google and Yahoo! that will enable them to crawl and index flash (swf) files. It seems that the 'crawlable content' within flash movies are limited to the text elements and links and doesn't include images and videos.

From a broader perspective it is worth considering what, if any, impact this might have on the landscape of search results and of search marketing. It's difficult to believe that even with the ability to crack open flash movies and consume the text content within them that search engines are going to have an easy go at making sense of what's inside and appropriately assigning their relevance on search engine results for a few reasons below.

Deep Linking

While it has long been technically possible to allow for deep linking on flash-based website it is certainly not common or in all cases simple or straightforward. The 'named anchors' feature rolled out with Flash MX that intended to natively support this capability was a mess of browser support and is next to useless. Using some of these techniques each page has a different URL but contains the exact some flash movie, using javascript to load specific frames. It's doubtful that search engines are going to be able to take this into account and recognize 'different pages' within the movie. This obviously has a significant impact on a flash site's ability to rank well across a number of keywords.

Lack of Semantic Structure

The flash platform and the resulting movies lack the defined structure inherent in HTML making it more difficult for search engines to assign the weight and value of one text element over another. While you can extract all the text elements into a big word soup, it's likely difficult to analyze the resulting data for much more than frequency and because of this you can run into the problem of sites exploiting this.

Opportunities for Black Hat Trickery

Google and other search engines have become pretty sophisticated in sniffing out things like keyword stuffing, keyword hiding, and so on. It seems that it would be extraordinarily difficult to uncover similar techniques within flash movies. Since it seems likely that simple word frequency would be, at least initially, the best and/or only way to determine relevancy this could be problematic. If flash sites ranked on par with non-flash sites then there would be a lot of incentive and opportunity to game the search results via flash.

Conclusion

While it's great that Adobe and search engines are working together on opening up all the content currently hiding within flash movies, there are a lot of technical problems that would need to be overcome to meaningfully and appropriate index flash. In light of these issues I hope that, while still indexed, websites done primarily in flash do not de facto have the same weight in search results as sites that are not.

station four gets the 3G iPhone... early!

Chris Lahey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:57:00 -0700

AT&T totally messed our order for cellphones and they felt so bad that they send us the new 3g iPhones... FOR FREE!

Here I am yelling at my first client on my iPhone. It makes yelling at clients effortless and stylish. Here i am saying... "You better have paid dat bill. That was a MISTAKE!"

Here is Chris O yelling at another client. You better belive that this client paid their bill right away! With the clear, crisp iPhone there is no mistaking what Chris O is trying to say here... "You better pay yo money or I'm gonna eat you like a 5 dollar footlong".

the irony of life

Chris Lahey — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:55:00 -0700

Life has a very ironic way of balancing things out. Just as Station Four had found our dream designer (The Beastmaster) our lead designer and internet marketer met his demise... by being eaten by a mechanic on Battlestar Galactica. Oh cruel world! WHY!!?? WHY-HA-HA-WHYYYYYYYYY!!!!!?????

Chris Lahey stars in feature length film

Chris Olberding — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:27:00 -0700

Web developer Chris Lahey recently filmed a feature length movie under an assumed name:

Station Four Hires a New Designer!

Chris Lahey — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:01:00 -0700

At long last, and after hours of tirelessly searching, Station Four has finally hired.... The Beastmaster.

station four goes real bowling!

Chris Lahey — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:27:00 -0700

Lately, we've been hitting the Silver Strike at our local pub fairly regularly. There is just something about good beer, good friends, and some good ol' fashioned fake bowling. With Chris O (COG) and myself (CML) rapidly upping our scores we knew it was time to try our hand in some real bowling!

It's been years for both of us but don't let that fool you, we're sharks!

Now, you already know we've been getting pretty good at throwing the football left handed and as it turns out, pretty good bowling left handed as well.

Notice the fine form there. Not too shabby.

And here is Chris O. Keep your eyes on the prize Chrissy.

A day later and we're feeling the pain. Who knew real bowling was so hard?

2008: What We're Up To

Chris Olberding — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:36:00 -0700

The Station Four team has been quite busy in 2008. So far the first part of the year has been pretty intense compared to strenuous days of too much food and cat naps that were the holidays.

On the 17th of January, Chris Olberding and Chris Lahey attended an AIGA sponsored business roundtable with the owners of a number of other firms in the Jacksonville area such as Jeff Harrington of Harrington Design and Carl Smith of nGen Works

In the interest of making achievable resolutions for 2008 the team here has resolved to be able to throw a football well with their off hand. After battling through some initial soreness and ugly throws I'm happy to report that the progress has been good on that endeavor.

Station Four is also ramping up a number of internal projects. We are currently developing a backend system for our clients to track their projects and associated files, manage approval of deliverables, and other good stuff. We’re also talking with gallery owners and artists researching the viability of a community based social network for visual artists and galleries with the goal of fostering the Jacksonville art community.

Photoshop CS3 Crashing When Opening a File

Chris Olberding — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:34:00 -0700

Over the last month I had begun to notice significant performance issues when working with Photoshop CS3 eventually culminating Photoshop crashing when trying to load any file. Apparently PS has some major bugs and issues involving network printers.

If your default printer is a network printer Photoshop will stall and delay when opening any file.

Our printer at S4 is attached to another computer which I access over the network, last week we replaced that system with a new notebook, which was given a different name and place on the network leaving me with a broken printer connection. Apparently this was the cause of Photoshop crashing. Try to keep your default printer set as a local device if you're experiencing any of the same issues.

I was also experiencing some of the toolbars and other windows being blank until I rolled over them but this seems to be fixed by updating the Adobe suite.