Google learns to crawl Flash

Sasha Dzeletovic, Sunday, July 6, 2008 @ 4:49 pm

For a technology used to publish content on the internet, not being able to be properly indexed by search engines is a big snag. That is one of the first questions that is raised about Flash in any IT environment. The second one is how do you get around it. That might be about to change...

Usually you get around it by having to publish your content twice. Once for the user, a RIA experience, and once for the crawlers, some dynamically generated text in XML or HTML, so that it can be properly read and indexed. For sites that need visibility (and most do) this created "extra" work. No work is extra in solving a problem, the extra part comes in price of it, ergo the snag.

All that might be at an end. Google announced on their blog that they have 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."

Sounds good, doesn't it? Well let's give it a test drive. Bellow is a link for a Flash file that loads text from an XML file residing on another server. Let's leave it a couple of weeks to simmer and see if we can find this page on Google by "unique" string of keywords from this Flash file.

Cheers to people from Google for making this happen!

Google Flash indexing test link

Topics: Flash, Flex, Google, SEO

Comments (3)

Technologies and Platforms

Comments: 3 so far

Hi!
Can you conclude anything from your test yet?

How did it go with the XML-file – is the content from XML indexed as well and how does it look in the SERPs?`

Thanks!

Comment by Christian - Eee PC Bloggen, Thursday, October 23, 2008 @ 1:44 am
Hi Chirstian,
Conclusion is that Google does not index dynamic Flash content, meaning XML content never made it to Google index.

The only thing that Google does index is embedded material (another test) which is some help but not tremendous.

Back to the same ol’ SEO techniques for Flash…

Comment by Sasha Dzeletovic, Wednesday, December 3, 2008 @ 3:43 pm
[...] mentioned in this post Google doesn’t index Flash dynamic content. We had to go back to standard SEO techniques for [...]

Pingback by Pathfinder Development » Pathfinder releases version 1 of the its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica), Thursday, December 4, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

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