In depth detail about Google's ability to crawl Flash website.
Which Flash files can Google better index now
Google improved its ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
What content can Google better index from these Flash files
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.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, Google also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into the crawling pipeline—just like it does with URLs that appear in non-Flash WebPages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
What about non-textual content, such as images
At present, Google only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, it will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, it doesn’t generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that it doesn’t index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file
Google developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Its’ algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. It can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but it can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.
What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. 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.
What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash
Major Limitations
There are three main limitations at present, which Google is already working on to resolve-
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 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.
3। While Google is 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, it will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
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