Professional SEO Companies have known as a rule of thumb that excessive use of Flash design can inhibit your ability to rank well in the search engines.

Within the last month, Google announced that its search engine has learned how to crawl Flash. As Google states on their official blog: Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

What does this all mean?  What Google is stating is they have developed a means of crawling “TEXTUAL” content within Flash files that are designed in buttons, menus, banners, and as they have stated self-contained web sites (those designed in Flash). URLs that are linked within Flash files are also crawled and may be added to their search results. Images that are using Flash are currently not supported by Google.

To Summarize:

• Google is now crawling text in some Flash Files.
• The Flash has to be in SWF format.
• SWF files can be gadgets, buttons, banners, menus, and self-contained web sites
• Basically if your site contains these elements, Google will find them and there’s really no need to do anything but wait and see what the results are.

This is just another step in allowing better search results for the variety of design and programming that’s out there today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Google, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.