SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news
Date : 2008 07 01 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianGoogle and Adobe have been working on improving the indexing of Flash applications. In the past we could simply look at the SWF files and try to grab strings out of them, but there was zero context.
To go further Google uses the SWF Searchable work from Adobe to be more of a 'human' actor on the application.
This is what it doesn't do:
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. We 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. While we are 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.This is good news for all rich applications. One of the common worries when it comes to richer application development is "what do search engines see" and we sometimes see people go back to the simpler world just to make that happier. With the search engines stepping up themselves, we can go back to writing applications that make sense for our human users, and hope that the computers catch up. Of course, we always have to do so in a practical way.