Great news for everyone who has Flash built website's and Flash content on your websites. On 1st July 2008 Google took its first steps to start to include Flash in its website search.Although Flash content always looks so smart and simple to use, businesses are always slightly resistant from using it, due to Google not including Flash content in search results.
However Adobe have now developed a special tool for Google & Yahoo to expose the text content within a Flash file to their crawlers. Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
Google has already begun to incorporated Flash into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them. Yahoo is expected to follow shortly.
Those who have use Flash remember that this does not mean Flash content is automatically going to show up in the top of search results. You will still have to battle for the top spot like any other site, and due to Flash content typically not having a lot of text content embedded this could become a difficuilt task.
I have created a webpage for the company I work for, which contains 90% Flash content, the problem is I will now have to do some further work as when I create it I didnt consider making it search engine crawler friendly!
