Google Crawls Flash Files Even Better Now
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, June 21, 2009 Leave a comment
It has been some time since Google announced that it can crawl and index Flash files. Even then, the capability was very limited. The search engine has recently expanded on that ability, however.
From the Webmaster Central Blog:
* Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
* Discover links within Flash files.
* Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
* Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
* Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.
So it looks like video optimization is moving a little closer to photo optimization only better. As of now Google can’t crawl or index content within photos, but it does use text near the photo to better understand what a photo is about. The primary ingredient in photo optimization, however, is the alt tag.
With video, there’s no alt tag, but Google can crawl an SWF file and detect links, which is a huge move forward. Webmasters should have a heydey with this one.
Leave a comment Category: SEO
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