Search Engine Optimizers, Google and Flash

It had become a practice rather I would say demand of Search Engine Optimizers not to have much of Flash content on the web pages being optimized. The reason was Google’s spiders could not parse the textual content that was written in flash animation. Now as a site owner I would not want flash elements to be removed from my site as well want to have my website optimized for search engines specially Google, so in such scenarios optimizers use to generate text as the output on the page along with the Flash. Flash solving the purpose of giving an attractive look and text helping in the optimization activities.

Recently while Google’s spiders started parsing flash it’s was a relief for optimizers that they do not have to find way out to optimize a page with flash for search engines. At times people started the practice of creating a textual page for search engines and flash page for visitors, though it is a bad idea as Google can track this but people did that. But this advancement in the abilities of spiders has solved the problem of not using Flash in web pages because it’s not good for search engine to parse.

As we know that flash file embedded in web pages are of .swf extension which in a complied form of .fla (the source), the question comes how Google is able to do this? I do not have an exact answer for this, rather I tried searching Google ….. ;-) but didn’t found any thing concrete. From my experience of programming I believe that Google might have developed some component of its own, which extracts the text from a Flash File. If you are familiar with Macromedia products, they have a tool called Flash Search Engine SDK, which takes a Flash file as an input and returns HTML outputting the textual content of the flash animation. So it’s not a big deal for Google if it has developed some component of its own which extracts text from the flash, once the text is extracted then it can be processed for indexing the page or giving a page rank.

To confirm that Google has started parsing Flash files, perform a search on Google with specifying .swf as the value of filetype operator. Say for example you want to search “Web services in India” and want to see only the flash result, you can type “web services in india filetype:swf” in the Google search bar and you will notice with all the results fetched will be have indication [FLASH] with every link. Isn’t this interesting!

You might want to see what Google will parse while parsing your Flash File, you can do this by using the Macromedia’s Flash Search Engine SDK. You will get more details about this SDK, a link to download the same and how to use it on Macromedia’s website http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/download/search_engine/

So when now Google's spiders are able to parse Flash files, and rank them too then no need of “Do Flash” mantra. With this advancement of Google everyone is happy, someone might not be if they have made there site non-flash just because of the reason Google can not parse it!

Maneet Puri - 10 years of industry experience has made him expert in all aspects of deploying a web based application. It could be web design, web development SEO or SEM,. Now he is heading a Web Design & Development company, based in India with roots from the UK.

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