Googlebot and Flash?
July 1st, 2008Hi peeps,
Yesterday, Google’s Software Engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins posted at Google’s blog some shocking news: Googlebot has learned to index Flash contents!
As incredible as it might sound, apparently this is possible now thanks to a new library developed by Adobe known as Searchable SWF Library. This library delivers improved web search capabilities for SWF applications and provides web crawlers the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. All of the extracted info is indexed for relevance according to Google’s algorithm. Neat, huh?
All that glitters is not gold
While these are good news for all the web developers and flash coders, Google still has some technical limitations:
- If your website loads a Flash file via Javascript, Google may not have it indexed since Googlebot doesn’t execute some types of javascripts (I didn’t know that Googlebot can execute Javascript scripts until now!)
- If your Flash file loads external contents (HTML, XML, TXT, FLV, another SWF, etc) they won’t be considered as a part of your contents in the Flash file. Instead, these contents will be indexed separately.
- If contents in your Flash file are in Hebrew or Arabic they won’t be indexed. Apparently, there are some technical issues that prevents Google from reading those languages on Flash files.
- Embedded images will be ignored by Googlebot for now. Only textual contents will be crawled.
What Should I do to have my Flash files indexed by Google?
Nothing at all. Google will crawl your sites and if a Flash file is found they will try to index its contents up to their technical limits.
I believe that we’ll start to see some changes in the upcoming months. I wonder how this will influence on everyone’s SERP. I guess that all we can do for now is wait and see!
Check the rest of the info here: Improved Flash Indexing | Google’s Webmaster Central Blog
Cheers!
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