Google Develops a New Ability to Crawl Flash

1st July 2008 by Emily Mace

Good news for webmaster running a Flash website! Google has announced that, working with Adobe, they have developed a method of crawling textual elements of Flash on your website!

Previously the Google Webmaster Guidelines had warned against the use of Flash on websites as the Google Crawlers were unable to read the content, making Flash sites invisible to Google.

Now that Google have included a version of Adobe’s Flash Player in their crawler the headache for webmasters of Flash sites will be reduced. Even better news is that the Google crawler will be able to read a wide range of Flash elements on websites, including menus, buttons as well as self-contained Flash websites.

The information Google will pick up from your Flash website include all of the text a user sees when browsing the site. This will help Google discover the full depth of your website as it is now able to pick up links within the Flash on your site.

There are, however some warnings attached to this new development.

The first relates to any files loaded within the Flash elements on your site – if your flash file opens another file, Flash, HTML or another, Google won’t see this as part of the Flash file and will index it separately.

In addition there are still issues with Google reading JavaScript. If your Flash file is loaded from within JavaScript, Google still won’t see the content of the file.

As this news is hot off the presses at Google more information about the impact of these changes will come out soon particularly with regard to sites offering both Flash and HTML versions of the same content. We’ll be watching developments with interest.

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