Internet Marketing Blog

Good News Designers! Google Improves Indexing of Flash Pages

July 9, 2008 – 8:00 am

Is there anything that Google can’t do? It seems like there is big news coming out of the Google camp every week. The announcement last week that Google has improved its ability to crawl Flash websites is significant for web designers and business owners. So what exactly does this mean for you, and how should this news impact your approach to web design? Good question.

Below, I am giving my two cents, plus a quote from Google Software Engineers who work on the indexing team. It will be interesting to see how businesses react to the announcement, in terms of web design strategy. This issue has always been the knock against Flash sites.

• There is nothing major for you to do for this to take effect on your current Flash site/s, as the new Google algorithm will index most Flash content on your site that is not called in via javascript and other external files.
• If you are building site/s in Flash, consider breaking out the flash to multiple URLs, so that more of your Flash pages can be indexed. If your Flash site is one big Flash file (i.e. the URL does not change as you navigate the site), then you will lose big SEO opportunities, since Google will now look for URLs embedded within Flash files.
• Google’s Flash-indexing ability includes textual content in many types of SWF files, including Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, and self-contained Flash websites.
• According to Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on Google’s indexing team, Google’s new Flash algorithm remembers “all of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website 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.”

Overall, this is very positive news, that gives web developers and marketers more flexibility when it comes to planning website upgrades and new site development. The fact that Google is working closely with Adobe to make these enhancements shows the insight and prudence of both companies to bring two excellent web products in sync. Personally, I will be meeting with my project managers, web designers and clients to discuss how this announcement and ongoing improvements to Google’s new Flash algorithm will impact our approach to web design strategy.

To read more on this topic, you can check out the announcement from Google about improvements in Flash indexing. Otherwise, let’s keep this in everyone’s radar, and report back on some actual case studies that show how the new algorithm is starting to work for Flash websites.