What’s behind….

Posted on July 1, 2008

…all those flash files? Adobe has announced it is providing optimized Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to help them better index dynamic content and applications that include the Shockwave Flash file (SWF) format.

This assistance is to help the search engine spiders be able to find and index SWF content, including items such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.

When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized player on the search engine’s server. Google has developed a process that explores Flash files as a person would, such as by clicking on buttons and entering input. The algorithm then indexes all the text it encounters through the navigation.

That means all the text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used by Google to help determine a page’s relevance to the search query that has been entered. In addition, the URLs that appear in Flash files will be fed into Google’s crawling system and be indexed.

Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links inside of Flash files, but much of the content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect of the media files. Now, all the content that was essentially invisible to the search engines will appear in the search results.

Bottom line, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and relevance. Also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve the ranking of Flash web sites just like they do with HTML sites.