Google & Yahoo! make improvements to their Flash indexing capabilities

16 Jul, 2008 | Search Engine Optimisation

Previously, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files which has lead to much of the Flash-based content found on the web being unavailable in search results. But now, thanks to Google and Yahoo this is all about to change.

Google and Yahoo are now both able to crawl the textual elements within SWF files, including discovering links within those SWF files.

Google has been busy working on improving the way they crawl and index media rich content such as Flash and JavaScript for quite some time now, however these latest improvements are due in part from new technology provided by Adobe, which makes Google's algorithms "less error prone" and enables them to access content created in any version of Flash in a variety of languages.

From the official Google Blog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable 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.

Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There's more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Summary

• Google and Yahoo! will crawl SWF files
• Only the textual components can be crawled
• FLV filetype is not crawlable
• Google can read Flash files that are generated by JavaScript such as SWFObject
• Google may index the external files your Flash file calls and won't associate them to the Flash files

Further Reading

Adobe press release

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl flash

Google Webmaster Central blog: Improved Flash indexing

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