Google has improved Flash indexing
Google has announced that they have greatly improved the searching and indexing of Flash files
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Thanks in part to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, Google has come up with new algorithms that better search and index Flash (.swf) files.
Basically, Google can now index any textual content in a Flash file (I was under the impression that it could always do that…). I would imagine this would be text blocks that haven’t been broken apart, which some designers do to apply animation effects. In other words, say you wanted a headline that came in one letter at a time (like a typewriter)…. each letter would be a seperate element, thus put together, it reads as a word, but Google would see it as the individual letters.
In addition to text blocks, Google can now track links to other pages. While things like anchor text and title tags cannot be attributed to these links, the fact that Google can now at least REACH these pages through Flash is huge!
Google still cannot index any image elements, or really anything other than text and urls, but this is still a really big step in getting Flash sites indexed (or even having Flash elements on a page support the page content).
Read the Google Webmasters Q and A about Flash indexing.
