SEO for Adobe Edge Animate [Updated]

Adobe Edge Animate is a new platform (in “preview” mode) that allows developers to create Flash-like user experiences including animation built with HTML 5 rather than Flash.

This bodes well for cross-platform compatibility (*cough*iPad*cough*), but what are the SEO implications?  Can Google adequately crawl content that is placed on a page with Adobe Edge Animate?  We set out to answer these questions by looking at two test pages created with Adobe Edge Animate:

• Adobe Edge SEO Test One
• Adobe Edge Animate SEO Test Two 

When we first looked at the Adobe Edge preview in May 2012, we did not see any promising SEO advantages to using Edge over Flash, as the content generated was not search-engine-crawlable.  As of November, 2012, Adobe has updated Edge to include multiple tools & services whilst renaming the main component from “Edge Preview” to “Edge Animate” to go along with other tools in the Suite: Reflow, Code, Inspect, and Web Fonts.

The other tools aid in the development process; for this blog post, we are focused on the SEO implications of Edge Animate.

Since last previewing Adobe Edge in early 2012, we are now seeing a promising new feature in the latest builds: “Publish Content as Static HTML”

When this option is selected, Adobe emits “HTML markup for SEO friendliness.”

In early 2012, we noticed that Google would not crawl the content from Adobe Edge which is housed in JavaScript. The HTML code you get from the default publish option in Adobe Edge is the following:

As a workaround we entered in some alternate text (with and without noscript tags) and Google was able to crawl both. View the source and snippet  in Test Example One to see how this came out.

Now, as of November 2012, our previously workaround is no longer necessary.  Instead, you can use the “Publish Content as Static HTML” feature in Edge Animate. When this is enabled, Adobe renders the readable text as HTML elements for SEO friendliness, like this truncated example below:

You can view the source in Test Two to see how it fully renders the HTML content. Test One and Test Two use the same source file from Edge Animate, the only difference is selecting the Publish Static HTML option.

With this new option, Google can crawl the Adobe Edge content; and with that, this new platform is shaping up to be a promising SEO-friendly replacement to Flash.