Can a Flash .SWF outrank a .HTML file?
I’m running a small test to determine if .swf files can achieve higher rankings then .html files. Why is this important? Well, historically full flash web sites have been difficult to rank well, but in the past few months, the major search engines have greatly improved their indexing of flash based files.
So, have we reached a day where full flash web sites and html sites can be ranked equally? Probably not. But what happens if we throw some major link love towards the flash sites?
Test:
1. Create two similar files - one flash, one html.
2. Optimize both for a non-existent search term “sirchingine“.
3. Link to both through this post using the anchor text “sirchingine“.
4. Track which file ranks better for the search term - I hypothesize the HTML file will.
5. Add additional backlinks to flash file - monitor change in rankings.
What can we learn?
My hope is to show that full flash web pages can indeed outrank well optimized HTML pages if enough backlinks fuel the flash page.
Google Announces they Crawl Flash
A few days ago, Google officially announced they can crawl flash files. Here’s is what they said,
“Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.”
Now this revelation is something I already posted about back in may (see post), but I suspect the general public wasn’t catching on. So Google now makes an official announcement. I guess the days of “flash web sites can’t be crawled” are gone. I guess that’s a good thing. Now be prepared for spammy .SWF’s in the results pages for a while.
Google Successfully Indexing Flash Files
I was surprised to find out that Google has no problem indexing, reading text and following links in flash files.
Now I’m sure this isn’t new information to some of you, but others may require a bit more proof.
For the proof, go to google and type in: seo” filetype:swf
What this is doing is searching for the term, “seo” and restricting the results to only .swf file types.
Notice the term [FLASH] next to the results page listing indicating it’s a flash document.
Notice how Google pulls the first few words out of the flash file to generate the title.
Now I haven’t really seen flash files rank well in the SERP when thrown in with web pages, but it is proof that Google can read text and follow links in flash files.
Go ahead and do some testing. Let me know how well your flash files are getting indexed.
