Now Google has better impact on SWF content … this is not new. Story begins 2008 .In mid 2008 Google announced that through a collaboration with Adobe, Google had significantly improved capability to index Flash technology based content. Google developed a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. And Google improved the performance of Flash indexing algorithm. Before launch Flash indexing system web designers faced a problem of presenting data via flash content. Because , robots can not follow generic flash. They have to pay extra effort to present there data and sites on search engines.

From year 2008 google have ability on index textual content in SWF files. But although not a better system. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites. How on earth Google can do this miracle ? Basically Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches. Google isn’t stop from here, Google Flash indexing algorithm has ability to discover URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling queue .  This is very much similar to indexing non-Flash websites and web pages. it’s better on indexing inlinks as well.

Is there any thing special thing to do on your flash content to get index on Google ?  No absolutely you don’t need to do anything. This is good news for both web designers and for web masters. Google Flash indexing algorithm mighty enough to find and index every thing on your flash/SWF application. (But not all )

Earlier Google had problem on reading on SWF file loads with html, xml, or another SWF application. Both objects reads separately and there isn’t any combination with two files between SWF which loads in side html,xml or another SWF. But now it’s also resolved. This means when a SWF file loads content from some other file such as HTML, XML, another SWF, Google can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

Lets see what are the Google’s ability on reading and indexing Flash contents,

# . Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. Google can click buttons and enter input, just like a normal user.

# . 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 and AS2, Google also index sites with AS3 as well.

If you do not want your flash content index on google , just use your robots.txt file to keep away crawlers from you. It’s simple.

From last month Google resolved some of there problem with JavaScripts , Now Google better in indexing and handling sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content.  And also Google improved there video indexing technology now they has better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos.

Still all the matters not resolved for Google. Still  they fails on indexing deep linking through SWF. And also with JavaScripts. Which means they need to work on improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript.

Now Adobe & search engines like Google and Yahoo ! doing great with SWF contents. Isn’t this simply awesome !