Hopefully this standardised option will allow webmasters and optimisers useful info on visitors.

So What Does It Do?

This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

What Do I Need?

Flex or Flash with ActionScript 3 and Flex or Flash Visual Components.

Full story can be read on the Official Analytics Blog.

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When doing your keyword research it’s worth finding out what Google thinks people are searching for when they enter that keyword term. For example if you are optimising for the term ‘football’ (Soccer) then simply type that term into Google and scroll to the bottom of the page.

You’ll be presented with 8 links that looks like

Google clearly links your search with the “+ terms” of games, pictures, boots, rules, results, live and history. It also throws a curve ball of rugby in there. So now you have 8 new terms to optimise a landing page for which could be generating significant traffic from your main term if people click through on these links (and people love to click rather than type).

Sometimes it does throw up some pretty random results, searching for ‘cheese’ gives me the + term ‘games’ (if anybody knows what a cheese game is please tell me) but somebody somewhere is searching for this. You might as well have the traffic over some other site and it’s all about the longtail.

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In line with their mission to bring people the most relevant content it seems like a good idea as there is very rarely any information contained on these splash pages and most seem to consist of an elaborate video as you watch the pieces of the site fall into place before you can get at the content.

However is this one time that Google is playing catch-up and is it just for Flash sites or other splash pages that it’s trying to get rid of?

Intro pages generally started to lose favour after the publishing of Jacob Nielsen’s article that Flash was “99% Bad” in late 2000, not long after Google started to pick up some steam. The report itself is generally inaccurate these days (and indeed some was then) but it did get designers starting to think about what they were doing with Flash. From that point on less and less sites used a splash page and current Flash websites have mostly be redesigned to get rid of them.

However some do still exist and I certainly think that skipping them is a great option, especially if I’ve been to the page before. This would have been better 5 years ago, but thanks anyway Google.

There are different types of intro pages though and currently Google does not seem to offer the option to skip them all, but it’s unclear how they select the ones who do. There currently doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Google will allow users to skip intros that don’t have a ’skip intro’ link on them, however not all Flash sites that do seem to be given that link either. Could it be tracking which intros users aren’t watching and offering the option on those sites only?

There’s also some evidence that sites which aren’t pure Flash have the [skip intro] option on them. Sites such as KaraokeMusicServices.com (I was at K-box at the weekend ) are, in this instance, a parked page with a Flash intro inserted as an object. In this case there is a also a skip option, but that can’t be the only deciding factor.

The intro is inserted by using object tags.

Some sites actually present the users with an advert as a splash page, such as the NYTimes and The Onion. Both of these sites give the user the option to skip the ad, however Google doesn’t give the user the option to go directly to the content from the search results. How does it differentiate the pages?

My initial thoughts are that Googlebot looks for an isolated ‘Skip Intro’ text link next to a Flash object file and that the ‘Skip Intro’ can also, obviously, be in other languages such as the French ’Passer l’introduction’.

The question then becomes that if Google hates splash pages will it eventually eliminate all results that don’t take the user directly to what they want and how will this effect revenue on sites like these?

A bit more research is required before a conclusive result can be drawn.

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A big stumbling block in whether or not future updates of crawlers will be able to do more with Flash has to do with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Many sites use stylised text ’symbols’ instead of the ‘dynamic’ graphical text, this cuts down on the size of files as it doesn’t matter how many times a symbol is used it is only loaded once.

With the most recent update for crawlers encountering swf files Google has only now added the ability to read dynamic text, despite it being introduced in August 2000 with Flash 5. If it has taken them a full 8 years to develop a way to do this relatively more simple task, it looks like it will be a long way off before they are able to do fully automated OCR.

In April 2007 Google sponsored an open source project into character recognition called Ocropus. It’s goal was not to develop an AI that could recognise text in symbols, but rather one that could assist in cataloging libraries and helping vision impaired web users.

Building on their acquisition of HP’s 20 year old software Tesseract (another OCR designed to help catalogue physical book) as well as their recent announcement of working with Adobe, Google would appear to be working actively to catalogue even more of the world’s knowledge, much of which is in picture format.

Whilst piecing this together is a big leap from these facts alone, other information would seem to suggest that they are interested in being able to read and recognise images on the web. In June 2007 Google filed a patent for recognising text in images, although a spokesperson for Google later stated that they

…file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services; some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.

With the advent of search engines like kooaba allowing users to send images via multi-media messages from their phones and get seemingly accurate results, how long will it be before everything Google are investing in allow it to do the same?

Personally, I don’t see this technology happening for the next 3 to 5 years in any usable format and until that point I’d recommend still following all the usual practises for optimising Flash sites.

Have I made too bold a leap here? Let me know in the comments.

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