Flashy Flash now crawled by Google

Once upon a time web developers and graphic designers may have looked at Flash as pretty, but pointless. Although Flash features on a website can be extremely aesthetically pleasing, previously they carried no weight in search engines. Visitors may have been impressed and spellbound by the animated characters, page transitions, and other forms of interactivity— which may have lead to traffic retention and even an upswing in sales—but as far as visibility and indexing in the SERPs goes, spiders crawling the content of a webpage don’t care much for the bells and whistles Flash provides.

Well folks, the days of writing off fancy flash text as useless to search engines are over. Google announced in its official blog that it has incorporated Adobe's Flash Player technology to provide a new way for its algorithm to crawl and index Flash files.

“[From] Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites,” all text-based Flash elements on your page can now be crawled and indexed by Google. The new Flash indexing algorithm will enable web designers to see their creative efforts in Flash reflected in their page ranking with Google and their overall website visibility.

The secret lies in Google’s recent integration of “Searchable SWF.” Google posted more on this technology in its Webmaster Central blog. “All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file,” the post indicated, is fair game to be crawled and indexed by the spiders. That content, Google writes, “can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website” to be displayed on the SERPs; it can even be matched directly with keywords entered by a web surfer.

For now, only text-based Flash content is traceable. Spiffy images, and all text embedded into an image file, will not be crawled by Google. Also, the post recommended that web developers “do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.”

Lastly, Google listed three current “main limitations” which may interfere with or annoy developers. These are the limitations as described in the Google blog post:

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.

The post stated that Google is at work to remedy these issues, and to check back for more updates. Until then, Flash your heart out, and know that your hard work can begin to pay off in the algorithms.