Google’s starts flashing...SEO gurus take note.
With the recent announcement that Google is indexing Flash files and flash-developed e-commerce sites, this is especially good news for web developers and seo gurus of the world.
Google will see all of text on a site as they interact with Flash files. If your site contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
Google says in addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, they’re also finding URLs in Flash files, and feeding them into their crawling pipeline—just like they do with URLs that appear in non-Flash web pages. For example, if a Flash application contains links to pages inside the website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of the website.
Previously, web designers were challenged if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexed by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
With Google’s new Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and can expect to see better search results and snippets.
Which Flash files can Google better index now? They can index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. What content can Google better index from these Flash files? All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If websites contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches. What about non-textual content, such as images? At present, they are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If Flash files only include images, they will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. And they do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL but which have no associated text.
Google "sees" the contents of a Flash file via an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. The algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. Designers do not need to do anything to their existing Flash files. If designers have Flash content on their website, Google will automatically begin to index it. That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible.
There are three main limitations though: Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if the 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. They also do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by 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 the Flash file. Finally, there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, they will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
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