Google Can Index “Almost Any Text” In A Flash (SWF) File
The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on their Flash indexing capabilities. Google said, as of today, they are able to index and understand “almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site.”
Typically, Flash has been one of those big No-Nos in the SEO space. I still do not believe any SEO would recommend anyone to build out a site completely built in Flash. However, there are many Flash sites out there that are not concerned with being indexed, either intentionally or not intentionally, but Google wants to index them.
Google has been working with Adobe to continually better index Flash content. In 2008, Google made stride in indexing Flash content and improved on that last year as well. Now, Google is able to index almost all the text and links within a Flash file.
In addition, Google said they can index the latest compatible content for Flash Player 10.1 and they are better at understanding JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, Google is also better at detecting and extracting meta data from Flash video files, metadata such as alternate thumbnails.
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