Indexing Flash Contents - Google improved indexing Flash

Now Google has better impact on SWF content … this is not new. The story begins in mid-2008 when Google announced that through a collaboration with Adobe, Google had significantly improved capability to index Flash technology based content. Google developed a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Google also improved the performance of Flash indexing algorithm. Before launch Flash indexing system web designers faced a problem of presenting data via flash content. Because robots can not follow generic flash, they have to pay extra effort to present their data and sites on search engines.

From the year 2008 Google has had the ability to index textual content in SWF files. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites. How on earth Google can do this miracle? Basically 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 isn’t stop from here, Google Flash indexing algorithm has the ability to discover URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeds them into our crawling queue. This is very much similar to indexing non-Flash websites and web pages; it’s better on indexing in-links as well.

Is there any special thing to do on your flash content to get index on Google? No, you absolutely don’t need to do anything. This is good news for both web designers and for web masters. Google Flash indexing algorithm is mighty enough to find and index most things on your flash/SWF application. (But not all )
Earlier Google had a problem reading on SWF file loads with HTML, XML, or another SWF application. Both objects read separately and there isn’t any combination with two files between SWF which loads inside HTML, XML, or another SWF, but now that problem is also resolved. This means when a SWF file loads content from some other file such as HTML, XML, another SWF, Google can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
Lets see what Google’s ability is on reading and indexing Flash contents,

# . Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. Google can click buttons and enter input, just like a normal user.
# . Discover links within Flash files.
# . Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
# . Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
# . Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, Google also index sites with AS3 as well.

If you do not want your flash content index on google, just use your robots.txt file to keep away crawlers from you. It’s simple.

From last month Google resolved some of their problem with JavaScripts, Now Google is better in indexing and handling sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Also, Google improved their video indexing technology now they have better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos.

Still not all the matters are resolved for Google, Still they fail on indexing deep linking through SWF, and with JavaScript, which means they need to work on improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript.

Now Adobe & search engines like Google and Yahoo ! doing great with SWF contents. Isn’t this simply awesome !