__/ [Big Bill] on Thursday 15 September 2005 06:02 \__
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 03:55:43 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>__/ [John Bokma] on Wednesday 14 September 2005 20:03 \__
>>
>>> "KW Allen" <kwallen2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> [Flash]
>>>
>>> - technically SE's can extract text out of Flash files, not sure
>>> if this is already been done (Macromedia makes a SDK available)
>>
>>
>>Yes, I believe it's being done, but very reluctantly so. Also, the
>>developer must put the necessary information inside the clip in order for
>>it to contain some semantics rather than just floating objects.
>
> Just to muddy the waters, when I last examined all this no-one was
> letting on exactly how the SDK concept actually worked. So it's not
> like you can put text into your Flash files and know that it'll be
> readable by an SDK-abled engine. Bits of it, maybe, but what use is
> that? For SEO purposes you have to behave as if it simply isn't there.
I don't know much about that myself. I no longer use Flash. I worked with it
4-5 years ago though. Perhaps John knows more about the SDK, which by the
way is Microsoft terminology for Software Development Kit.
Flash, in principle, is proprietary. Attempts to hack it and extract some
information out of it would be computationally expensive so I imagine that
crawlers will not care enough to crawl/descent to it very often. It can
also be assumed that Flash does not contain much content, so it is not
worth indexing or referring surfers to. I noticed that you have a nice
Flash banner in your front page. That is absolutely fine. But... would you
truly expect a search engine to find it useful? Of course not. It is
attractive to surfers, however. As long as your site does not /reply/ on
Flash, You'll be far beyond "okay". Surfers will be happy and crawlers will
still get what they are often. I noticed that some sites encircle the Flash
clips with some tag like "Advertisements", which perhaps, just perhaps, is
intended to tell a surfer without Flash that (s)he misses nothing.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Hack to learn, don't learn to hack"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 74572E8E
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