So the news just broke, Adobe will be providing Google and Yahoo with a special Flash player that is optimized to look over the content of your SWF's and crawl its content as if you were the one clicking buttons and navigating within.
What does this mean? well pretty much Adobe is empowering some search engines to see your flash/flex based applications in a similar way as they see your HTML markup, pretty cool isn't it?
In the up run of the news is that your Flash/Flex based RIA's contents will be discoverable by the engines, those same engines that you use daily - or almost all of them - providing with business value to them just right out of the box, as per Ryan's post, there will be no need for changes of what you already have.
On the low run, Google and Yahoo will get to dictate the way they will get to use this player, which means that from now on developers will have to understand and play nice with the rules this guys propose, hopefully following similar approaches... but hey maybe just as Aggiorno exists for XHTML and ASP.NET sites today, there will be similar tools to help you tune up your RIA's for SEO in the future.
As up to today people has been struggling with work-a-rounds to get their RIA's into the engines: hacks as SWFObject and SWFAddress have been in place for sometime helping minimize the pain of SEO in such cases, but then again, what about dynamic views?
Silverlight's ways of embedding itself in pages are very similar to the way SWFObject works, it will pretty much replace the contents of the div element specified in the load method, take in count this happens only if the engine executes, which in the case of an engine spider reading the page will get to consume what ever exists inside this tag, which can be a SEO friendly copy of whatever the users sees. Same applies to SWFObject. Other wise everything is as defined by the markup.
There is still no word out on how long it will take for the engines to start taking advantage of this partnership, yet this is are great news on the way RIA's will become more ubiquitous and set the basics for Silvelright similar technologies to start their engines on, if it is not that they are already on the run!
Now, not to take down the news a bit, but where is Live Search in the list of search engines set to take advantage of this special player?
Update: Adding some links where you can find more points of views
Serge Jespers
Ted Patrick
TechCrunch
InsideRIA
Update: Google talks about how the Flash indexing will work.
Update: here is a follow up to this post, SEO for RIA: the status a few days later.
Technorati Tags: Flash,RIA,RIE,SEO,Silverlight
Gilbert - Google is currently rolling this out on their production servers. They expect that some of the new results should be visible by the end of the week.
ReplyDeleteCool... thanks Michelle for the heads up! I will be keeping my eyes open to start seeing some results!
ReplyDeleteI just wonder how the separation between RIA and Content Movies will execute.
I mean there are flash "applications" which are more content driven than say "Photoshop Express" which is more of an application in itself.
But again time and the game book will tell once they are well defined by the judges ;)
For all the fingerpointing and bellyaching that Microsoft gets when it does things I feel like I'm just asking to be trounced by asking about Live Search. I'm glad you were wondering the same thing I was... "um what about Live Search?"
ReplyDeleteFrustrating part about living in the MSFT world is that there is such a skewed perception that it makes it so tough to defend/stand up for MS because of how much grief you get.
Kurt
It will be interesting to see how search results change almost over night. Suddenly companies that were not competing with you organically will appear on your radar...
ReplyDeleteReally interesting how something conceptually so simple can potentially change the rules of the game.
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