This plugin displays your tag cloud in the form of a globe.

I’ve never really been a fan of word clouds since they first appeared (and seemed to do wonders for SEO… briefly) and despite having had the tag cloud on this blog since the beginning I was considering ditching it, or getting a nofollow plugin for them (the pages themselves are already noindex but seemed silly to leak Page Rank [as we all know PR is the defining factor of SEO*]).

Instead I’ll just cripple search engines ability to follow the links, although I may set up another site to see if they manage to crawl the links in widget as Google now claims.

Anyway, here’s a big version for you to see.

*If you think this is true you are an idiot

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I am a fraud.

Why am I making this admission? Well it’s come to my attention that much like 95% of people involved in optimising Flash all I’m doing is talking a good game.

I read, I research, I come up with ideas and impliment some of them, but I don’t actually run a pure Flash site with the intention of optimizing it and until I do how can you trust anything I say?!

So, I’m going to remedy that.

Over the next couple of months I’m going to build a site in Flash and try to get it to rank. How well will I succeed? Only one way to find out.

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In the search results though the Meta Description showed a bit of a difference. 

Go-Red results

Peugeot Results

Given the choice what one are you more likely to click on?

Quickly looking at the page it becomes obvious that whilst the Red Driving School site is pure Flash, the Peugeot site has the game embedded into a normal HTML page with all appropriate tags included.

The Red Driving School site does rank higher than the Peugeot site (however I doubt either are looking to optimise for the word ’swf’) but I would be much more inclined to click on the latter as it’s easier to tell what I’m going to be taken through to.

Looking into why the Red Driving site doesn’t have a Meta Description archive.org shows the site was first recorded in April 2005, so would have been made even before then. The ability to add Meta Tags to Flash only came about in Flash 8, which wasn’t released until September 2005, and has been part of the reason why old school search engine optimisers have always avoided Flash sites.

The moral of the story is to remember the basics when optimising a site in Flash. These days forgetting to add Meta Tags to your site is unforgivable, but people still do it!

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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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The answer is quite simple, just because I can optimise Flash doesn’t mean I either want to or that it’s easy. Indeed given the choice I’d rather just shove a handful of SEO friendly plugins into Wordpress, tinker around with the backend and let it take all of the stress out of the onpage SEO rather than work with almost any other CMS. As a majority of this site consists of my thoughts and ideas the Wordpress format is also more suited to it, I’ve not yet seen a pure Flash blog.

The other reason is that I’m not really much of a Flash designer. Traditionally SEO has been at one end of the scale and Flash sites at the other. Things do look like they’re changing, however I still don’t see Flash as a great platform to optimise for. Things might change so I try and keep at least on the curve for the latest Flash developments.

I think giving an example of my artistic skills should be enough to settle any further questions on this matter.

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MSN Search and Ask accounted for 9.5% of U.S. and 7% of U.K. traffic searches in June 2008 (source Hitwise). Ignoring the fact that Google and Yahoo still aren’t indexing Flash sites perfectly, do you really want to exclude that sort of percentage of your possible audience?

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TEXT

Search engines (or at least Google) has been able to index static text in Flash files for a while now, the difference is that it can now do the same for ‘dynamic text’.

In theory if more of your content is being crawled then the more phrases and words you can be relevant for, except without some clever programming the text is going to be unstructured and under-optimised.

LINKS

Even with clever programming your content may sit in clearly defined sections but your off page linking campaigns can’t link directly to the content. Flash sites inherently sit on just one URL, so focusing on one keyword for a specific section of content isn’t possible, resulting in the dilution of your anchor text’s keywords from links.

You can get over this problem by embedding the flash in php, but I’m talking here purely about a Flash site.

SITE ARCHITECTURE

There are three main limitations to Google’s ability to index Flash, two of these are directly realted to how the site is built.

From Google’s blog

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

I’ll go into what that means more later, but most recent Flash developments are based around JavaScript and despite everything Flash can do Google currently seem to be saying they’ll only index the text.

SEARCH FRIENDLY FLASH

Whilst this recent update doesn’t solve all the problems associated with Flash it does show that Google are looking to evolve beyond the HTML dominated search rankings and if the next incarnation of Flash (or the one after, or the one after) is 100% search engine friendly then having all the pieces in place now gives us an advantage.

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Full press release here.

Using Flash to build sites has typically resulted in poor search engine rankings as Flash files (.swf) are binary data and prove difficult to read for the crawlers as well as the difficulty of getting deep links to subpages.

Whilst there are still many obstacles to overcome and nobody is yet sure of how well Google can read Flash there is now a lot more that can be done to improve visibility through SEO.

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