I love to design flash websites. They are very popular among clients who want to launch a website for marketing their products. During early days, search engines were not able to index such flash powered websites. Most of the Flash-only websites are basically invisible to search engines. From time to time search engines technology developed and now today Adobe has announced it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines. This announcement is a big relief for Flash developers (including me also) who have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Google can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash websites. It can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not include FLV files. Such FLV video files are on mainly websites like YouTube. These FLV files are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.

If the website contains flash, the textual content in the flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for the website. Also, the words that appear in the flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches. This means that Google can easily find and index the textual content in Flash files. Google is also trying to discover URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into their crawling pipeline just like they do with URLs that appear in non-Flash web pages. If the flash website contains links to pages inside the website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of the website.

Still there are some limitations with Google searching and indexing flash websites. Googlebot does not execute some JavaScript. So if the web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, so in this case it will not be indexed. If the flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in that very flash file. Currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages.