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Search Engine Robots and Macromedia Flash

The Flash file format has become very popular, it enables web designers to express their creativity. The format has become so pervasive on corporate websites that the phrase flashturbation has been coined to describe the design.

Search Engine Robots have trouble with most documents that are not text or HTML. Some search engines, notably Google, index Word, Powerpoint and PDF documents. To overcome these problems Macromedia have built a utility that can extract text descriptions and hyperlinks from Flash files. The program has been made available to search engines.

Flash and similar formats should still be treated with caution. Indexing will take more resources so a search engine may not do it as a priority, if at all. It will also be harder to optimize such content.

Search Engine Robots and Macromedia Flash

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