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Flash and SEO: Google now does Flash

July 2nd, 2008 by G Dewald

Filed Under Technology |

Google just announced that they have made some improvements to how they crawl (i.e read) Flash content.

Some highlights:

  • This only applies to SWF files, not FLV (FLV is a common video format used with Flash).
  • Googlebot will read the text from the SWF (not images that look like text, but actual text content).
  • Google will discover web addresses that are in the SWF file.
  • Google will not discover web addresses inside SWF files that do not use text as the link

There’s a few more points so if you’re geekily inclined, read the Google Flash announcement.

1 Comment

1 afullerton

July 17th, 2008 | 12:53 pm

This is pretty interesting, another example of Google responding to the market. I personally feel like this should have been better addressed earlier, as designers and bandwidth alike seem to be expanding exponentially. It also made me think about the affect this would have on Microsoft’s answer to Flash, Silverlight.
Microsoft saw a hole in the market and took advantage of it by making their version of an animated browser plugin SEO friendly. As the plugin is gaining traction both in the SEO and design world, who will be victorious? Will Google refine their legions fast enough to make the standard, SWF and FLV files completely searchable before Microsoft’s market niche can take off? I know I ‘m quite curious myself.

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