Latest Google on Flash indexing!

Google gets on Flash indexing : crawling and indexing

Google has improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

Google has recently come up with Indexing flash sites.

• Google has the ability to index textual content in SWF files. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
• 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.
• Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Google uses the algorithm's effectiveness which was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.
• If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

LIMITATIONS OF Google for FLASH INDEXING:

1. 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.

2. Google 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.

3. Google would be able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

4) Google can't index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Non-textual content, such as images can't be indexed by Google


Now that Google has launched Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets




source: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com