Google Improves Flash Indexing !

1. July 2008
Comments (2)

I'm a recent newcomer to Adobe Flex development so when I read yesterday that Google has improved it's ability to crawl SWF files of all kinds, it put a Smile on my face.  Google can now index the textual content in flash files of all kinds. They can also crawl URLs embedded in Flash files as well!  How do they do it? Google says:

"We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library."

Even better is the fact that Flex/Flash devs don't need to do anything special with their SWF files. Just keep on developing as usual!

According to Google, there are 3 limitation to crawling the text in your SWF files:

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.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files

You can read more about this here here here and here .

Adobe Flex ,

Comments

SEO tips
SEO tips
7/4/2008 1:42:22 PM #
Without a doubt, Flash has certainly gone a long way since the times it was an antonym of SEO friendliness and performance. I'm well aware of all that.

On the other hand, I still do believe that non-Flash site will always win in a SEO match against Flash site anytime (supposing these websites have comparable number of links, content etc...).

Flash based websites might start becoming more frequent but personally, I am going to stick with ordinary oldschool non-Flash websites for at least a couple of years.

Richard
Brent
Brent
7/4/2008 2:20:10 PM #
I agree. It's definately too early to use extensive flash on a site that you want indexed by search engines. The amount of flash content I use on my sites won't change. But, it's good to know that Google will use the text in my SWFs or crawl a link embedded in my SWFs too.
Comments are closed