San Francisco — Since last year, Google initiated crawling and indexing Flash content, though it failed to appeal the users. Nevertheless, Google today announced that it has enhanced its search engine’s capabilities to index Adobe’s Flash files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders. Additionally, Google says it can now index external flash content that loads within an SWF file, and associate it with that file, so that it will appear in search results.
Google claims that with the improved release the search engine can now index external content that can be in the form of HTML, XML or even another SWF file, the company said Friday.
Google’s update analyzes and extracts the content in that file, and then they index it.
For example, a site that loads something like this in Flash:
…and the display might appear in a Google SERP snippet for the query [2002 VW Transporter 888] like this:
The Google search engine will also linkup the indexed Flash file to this externally loaded content and the documents from where it comes, Google said.
“This new capability enhances search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users’ queries,” wrote Google software engineer Janis Stipins in an official blog.
With this update, Google’s search engine is capable of the following when encountering a Flash file:
- Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
- 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, AS2 and AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.
But as for AS3, Stipins says, “The ActionScript version is not particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.”
Webmasters who have SWF files on the web that do not want them or any of their external resources crawled, can take care of this with their robots.txt file.
Time and testing will determine how effective this update will be. But Friday’s announcement is the current in Google’s multiyear effort to improve its indexing of Flash files and specifically builds on the announcement in June of last year that Google had developed a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files.
At the initial launch, Adobe also said that it was providing optimized Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help with their ongoing efforts to better index Flash files.
Enhancing to search and crawl Flash by Google, Yahoo and others would not only beneficial for the search engines and their end users but also webmasters and designers, who have struggled to have the Flash portions of their sites indexed and made searchable.