Okay, I know that search engines supposedly mark down content that is duplicated, with the most benefit to the site that originally hosted the content, but does this work for swfs (Flash games in particular) too? I release games for viral marketing, but this suddenly crossed my mind. I don't want those sites that get more traffic and rank better to have my games as being released on their site first, even though they weren't, simply because they got spidered first.
As I know they don't do anything like that. Only text is checked for duplicit. Images, flash and anything else not.
Their algorithm might not support anything other than text, but there is no way for us to be completely sure about it. Perhaps some SEO expert can confirm this.
Thanks, I was wondering, seeing as search engines are getting better at spidering Flash content, whether or not this would then make them applicable for duplicate content. Although the Flash game had actually been spidered by the time I started distributing it.
if google has to choose between 2 identical swfs, it will use a bunch of factors we know about and probably a bunch more we don't. Backlinks and PR no doubt play a part.
I think they can spider them better than they used to. Certainly, results marked [FLASH] show up in Google's results, and I seem to recall something about the ability to spider links in actual Flash files has improved. I would hope that it would pick the site the file was originally released on first.