14 DAY TRIAL // For many years, web developers were faced with a tough decision, they could either build a site optimized for search engines or one offering a rich experience, which at the time meant using Flash.
This is because Google along with other search engines could only index little Flash content or none at all. This changed dramatically a couple of years ago and Google has been making progress since. Today, Google says, most Flash content should be indexable.
"Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities," Jifeng Situ and Sverre Sundsdal, Software Engineers at Google, wrote.
"Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1," they added.
"Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content... Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology," they continued.
Google went through the progress made in indexing Flash content. While, at first, just some portions of a site built with Flash were seen by the Googlebot, more components were added. The indexing engine could retrieve text from buttons and menus or even from sites built entirely in Flash.
Along with text, most of which can now be indexed, Googlebot can follow links found in Flash content. More recently, the team has been making progress in indexing Flash content within JavaScript code and extracting data from video content served with Flash.
Still, Google says it's not done yet. While it can index hundreds of millions of pages with Flash, Google says it is now working on things like deep links within Flash content and better handling of Flash in JavaScript.