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Flash becomes searchable – Google announcement Posted in Digital Strategy, Website Usability, Concocted by Fred Roed, 2 comments
Published on 1 July 2008

Google posted this last night:

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.

I guess this changes the ball game somewhat? Whoop. There it is.

Read more posts by Fred Roed

Fred Roed

Fred is the CEO of digital marketing agency World Wide Creative. Fred co-founded The Heavy Chef Project, as well as Ideate, a forum for African entrepreneurs. Fred focuses on online brand building, marketing strategy and loud Hawaiian shirts. Fred is famous for his sartorial excellence, long diatribes about music and fanatical attention to detail when making pizza. Follow Fred on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Fred_Roed

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  1. Chris Beech says

    The big question is what are the current limitations? Well Google only has 3 at the moment and they have already made headway resolving them:
    “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.”
    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

  2. Fred says

    Chris, it’s great news (especially for an evangelist like yourself), and once these issues are resolved, it will be interesting to see how many new sites built in Flash will bubble to the top.