Do you remember when most SEO experts would advise site owners not to use Flash if they wanted to be visible in search engines? Well, a few key technological advances now make it easier for search engines to index text associated with this versatile graphical file format.
Search spiders didn't like Flash
Until recently, search engines couldn't access Flash content for indexing because their bots couldn't read the content inside Flash's SWF files, including the text within the content.
The Macromedia Flash SWF file format was designed to deliver vector graphics and animation over the internet as a very efficient delivery format for on-screen display over a network with limited bandwidth. The files are compressed to be small and are coded in binary format, which is not humanly readable like HTML. This is what stumped the search bots. As a result, SEO experts would caution their clients not to use Flash, or to use it sparingly on their websites if they wanted to be indexed by the big search engines.
In addition to this problem, search crawlers couldn't link back to whatever content was found. This was because Flash-based pages provide a lot of interactive content (e.g., product details, product descriptions, shopping carts, etc.) on a single URL, without reloading the browser. So, all of the site content is located at www.yoursite.com -- there are no pages like www.yoursite.com/productA or www.yoursite.com/shopping_cart.php. So, even if a search spider discovered a given product description, it could only link back to the first "state" of the Flash (www.yoursite.com), not to the particular state that included the product description.
This was a problem because even if Google, Yahoo, or Bing were to find and index a Flash web page, the searcher would land on the Flash homepage and then still have to find the desired page, instead of arriving directly at the desired product description. And if a searching customer wanted to email a link to a friend, he or she could only send a link to the homepage (the first state of the Flash).
Google's improved Flash indexing
After receiving numerous requests for better indexing of Adobe Flash files, Google announced improved Flash indexing last year. Here are some of the improvements made:
- Google has improved its ability to index textual content in SWF files, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash websites.
- If your site contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when 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.
- Besides finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, Google also discovers URLs that appear in Flash files and feeds them into its crawling pipeline -- just as it does with URLs for non-Flash web pages. That means Google can crawl deeper into your Flash site by following links.
- At present, Google can only discover and index textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, it will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images.
- Similarly, Google does not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons that target some URLs but have no associated text.
- Google does not index FLV files, such as videos on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
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