Ankit Rawat

Finally a good news for flash lovers. Now Google have the ability to crawl and index flash content. They have developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

Google now have the ability to index textual content from SWF files of all kind including gadgets, buttons, menus, self-contained flash websites and everything in between this Note that this is not applied with FLV files because these files don’t contains any text element.

According to Google there are 3 major limitations at present while crawling:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

The official document can be seen here.