What Google's Improved Flash Indexing Means for Your Website

Just recently, Google had announced its improvement on indexing Flash files. This announcement from Google is one good news for those who have Flash sites. Apparently, have you noticed this improvement on the search results of Google? Well, let’s learn more on the changes that had took place on this announcement.

What are the changes?

One of the changes that Google had done on their Flash indexing is that it can index the textual contents in SWF files of all kinds including the menus, buttons and other websites that have self-contained Flash animations. Another change is that Google can get to discover URLs appearing in Flash files whereas these URLs are added to the crawling pipelines of Google.

What have not changed?

Just like the old feature, Google still does not have the capability of recognizing texts on images. YouTube videos and FLV files among that can’t be indexed since they don’t contain any texts. Although, there are plenty of Flash websites that may consist of images and other multimedia elements, Google is still limited in recognizing texts. The only texts that Google can recognize are “Copyright”, “Please wait” and “Loading”.

Google still cannot execute JavaScript types of files. If you are loading a website with a Flash file via the use of JavaScript, it is a sure thing that Google won’t be able to find your Flash file. Most likely, Google still cannot attach any types of contents from other external sources that are loaded with Flash files. If your websites are loaded with XML or HTML Flash pages, the files will then be treated as separate documents.

Reasons Why Flash is a Big Problem for Most Search Engines

Regular HTML and Flash content pages are very different fundamentally. Now that Google can be able to index some texts on Flash content websites, it does not mean that the Flash files have now become as search engine friendly. Here are the reasons why it is not possible:

Dividing the texts into different yet meaningful sections is hard to do because Flash applications do not use or tags that are use to separate the sections of the texts. Because of this, it’s hard for Google to identify which is important and not. Another reason for Google’s difficulty in identification is that some Flash designers often break down the words into single letters to give cool effects on the texts. Basically the complete content of a website is presented on the same URL because linking to the special part of a Flash website is not allowed. Because of this reason as well, Google and other search engines find it hard to locate the relevant sections of Flash sites.

Flash websites do not get good inbound links to the right web pages since most Flash websites only get links from their own home page.

Flash websites have structures that are difficult to get high rankings since most of the Flash sites have hierarchies from other Flash sites. Another reason is that, no other websites are allowed to link to the internal Flash elements, which often results to lack of links from other websites.

Flash websites do not use basic methods of SEOs such as optimized title tags, headline tags or link texts.

Most of the Flash websites are still not crawlable by Google and other search engines because of the JavaScript calls.