Google to index SWF (finally)
Jul 02
Google and Adobe has been working together in order to improve Flash indexation. While this seem like a really good news, there are some important points to consider.
Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
Does this mean we’ll have to go back to the old way of embedding flash in webpages and drop SWFobject ?
We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your 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 your Flash file.
That’s a big stopper. Most rich flash websites load either external SWF or XML files, the website should be considered as a whole and not as separate entities. I guess it’s a technical challenge for Google/Adobe to work this out.
I’m also wondering how Google will rank the content in the web pages. We know that in HTML the title tag is the most important after that comes the headings, etc, etc. As far as I know that content in flash is most of the time not formatted this way, even if it’s possible.
So overall this is very good news, but there’s still some work to do.