Flash Search and Indexing – Google

Adobe Flash is a very popular multimedia platform due to its endless creative possibilities. You can create from a simple button to a whole animated movie. Even though it’s particularly attractive, it was hard to handle on the Web until now. Fortunately, great Flash visual effects will no longer be the worst designers’ nightmare.

In general, search engine spiders couldn’t see embedded content in Flash files when instead of HTML code. Entire Web sites designed using Flash were impossible to find without HTML links. Therefore, Google’s improved its capacity to index Adobe’s Flash files, and now it can display as searching result any Flash file contents such as text, HTML, XML or Flash content itself. Google is now capable to detect internal links in a Flash application, but not to recognize items with no text elements yet.

However, this big Google effort has three main limitations to keep on mind when Web designing on Flash:

• Googlebot, the search bot software used by Google, that builds a searchable index for the search engine, doesn’t execute some types of JavaScript, so a Flash file loaded by Java might not be seen by Google.

• Content from external resources loaded by Flash files, will be indexed separately, not as part of the main Flash file yet.

• Flash text content is now searchable in almost all of the languages found on the Web, but there’re still difficulties with bidirectional written content as Hebrew or Arabic that, for now, won’t be indexed.

Beyond those little considerations, designers are now pretty much free to work with Adobe’s Flash without thinking on tricky strategies to make Web sites searchable.  On the other hand, users can stop breaking their heads trying to find some particular Flash material. This Google hit benefits us all, webmasters, designers, advertisers and users. Since Internet is about being searchable and findable, Google has done a good job!

Sources:

• Perez. (2009, June 19). Google Improves Flash Search and Indexing. IDG News Service
• Alder, Stipins & Ohye. (2009, June 30). Improved Flash indexing. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
• Thomason (2003). Promotion Tip: Some Search Engines Index Flash Content. Webmaster Tips.