Site publishers who love Flash for its presentation but hate its near-invisibility to search crawlers should appreciate a recent announcement from Adobe.
Adobe plans to provide Google and Yahoo with its Flash Player technology in an effort to get more of the content created for the rich media format indexed in those search engines. Doing so should make more content available to the millions of people who search and would otherwise miss finding it.
Google is the first beneficiary of Adobe’s work. The addition of Flash to Google’s technology should pull content derived from various rich Internet applications into the search results now.
As the Google Webmaster Central blog noted, the integration of Flash into search allows it to read the text content inside Flash’s SWF files. Google also finds URLs inside Flash, which will lead its crawler to pages linked from the Flash content that it may not have found previously.
Yahoo’s search engine will gain the same capability in a future update of its technology. Yahoo Search is in the middle of one of its technology updates currently, but the Flash change will be part of a future update, a representative said in a statement.
Webmasters running sites with Flash content won’t need to do anything extra to make it searchable by Google and other engines that gain Flash crawling capability. However, Google did note that its crawler does not execute some types of JavaScript files, meaning it will miss a Flash file that requires such scripts to call it first.
