Search Marketing Blog
Decyphering Google’s Ability To Index Flash
Posted by Scott Fish on 07.30.2008
As recently announced, Google and Adobe have teamed up to create a solution for effectively indexing Flash files. If successful, this partnered development should have a tremendous impact upon the SEO industry.
Historically, Flash files have caused a lot of problems for search engine algorithms. This is due to the fact that they ignore the entire Flash files during the indexing of specific pages. Now, however, Google announced on June 30th that they will be able to index textual content in SWF files, which includes “Flash ‘gadgets’ such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between”.
In addition, Google states that it will be able to find, and differentiate, URLs within a Flash file. This has been a big problem in the past, since Flash files historically were only accessible through one file.
Google has already begun indexing Flash content, as evidence by this statement from their recent announcement, “If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability.”
Indexing Limitations
Google and Adobe are making changes daily to improve the indexing of Flash files, but there are some current limitations. According to the announcement, these limitations include:
- Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. Therefore, if your Web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not recognize it as a Flash file. In this case, your page will not be indexed. Note, however, that Google’s update on July 15th announced that they will enable support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.
- Google currently does 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 type of SWF file, Google will separately index that resource. However, it will not (yet) be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
- Google is able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the Web. However, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, Google will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
Optimizing for Flash
As a developer, here are a couple tactics that you should consider when creating Flash files to improve the likelihood of having your pages indexed by Google:
- Create separate URLs for each set of content within a Flash file for easier indexing.
- Now that all text in Flash files is visible to Google, be sure to convert unimportant text to paths or images to avoid the indexing of irrelevant text.
At EngineWorks, we have been evaluating the implications of this indexing Flash files announcement from Google. Due to the current limitations of this new partnership with Adobe, we recommend adhering to currently recognized SEO Best Practices when creating and redesigning search-friendly Web sites. In addition, we consider a hybrid layout featuring both Flash and HTML as the ideal format. This type of structure allows for the inclusion of effective optimization enhancements, while at the same time presenting an aesthetically pleasing design to your audience.
For more information on Flash File Optimization, visit these recommended sites:
Adobe’s SWF Searchability FAQ
Bobby van der Sluis’ article for Adobe.com
Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land
Andy Beal on Marketing Pilgrim
Eric Schonfeld on TechCrunch
al 07.31.2008 at 3:11 pm
Good Post thanks for sharing the knowledge
Scott Fish 07.31.2008 at 3:19 pm
Thanks Al, We’re excited to see how Google’s ability to understand Flash files improves search results and affects SEO.
Carri Bugbee 08.09.2008 at 9:49 am
Scott, great analysis of this new development. Thanks for adding such valuable insights to the Google announcement.