The internet changes every day and it's difficult to completely keep up with new technology. In jWAG we prefer to test out new things first and see if they are useful before simply reporting on the news like every other technology blogger is inclined to do.
However, last week Google made an announcement that is well worth reporting on, and one that certainly contradicts what we, and many other SEO professionals, have been saying for some time now.
So here it is: About 2 years ago Google announced that they would collaborate with Adobe to develop a way to read text from a Flash website, more specifically a SWF file. Then in June of 2009, Google announced that they had made strides with reading and understanding external files that are loaded into Flash. The more complex Flash files are built in layers, and sometimes the text in these layers is loaded only when needed. In June 2009, Google announced they were able to read these externally loaded text layers.
On November 11, 2010 Google finally announced that their index was able to read and understand almost all the text in any SWF file built with Flash 10.1 or greater.
This is indeed a huge leap forward for websites. We can no longer adamantly say that Flash websites will kill your search engine ranking.
Or at least that's the hope.
Honestly, since June 2008 when Google made the first announcement that they could partially read SWF files, we've been watching closely. We've documented several cases of jewelry websites that converted to Flash sites when they originally had dozens and even hundreds of pages. We presented our findings during our live events, and in every case, Google cleaned out their index for the jewelry website, leaving only a single home page with an SWF file.
In every case we tracked so far we've never seen any evidence of Google's ability to read into the SWF.
We are hopeful that some time in the future Google, Apple and Adobe will all play nice together, but we just don't see it happening overnight.
In the meantime according to comScore.com, in the USA there are 11.7 million users of Apple's iPhones and 19.1 million users of older Blackberry phones. These people still can't view Flash websites.
We still don't view a Flash website as a viable option for business owners that are serious about online marketing. But opinions can change given the proof. We'll let you know as soon as we have some.
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
