Some must know truths about Google indexing of Flash files

Google has been crawling the web for years and helping a lot of businesses to grow to a level they can never imagine.Since, a vast amount of business organisations started relying on web based identity...Some of them prefer a single portfolio page..that was enough for a better identity those days..but this starts changing when the business levels and style of business process changed...and as days passed...many are now relying on highly dynamic sites and started concentrating on flash based site..where user interactivity was the main intention.


But, soon the sad news for these people came up which was really horrible that google cant index flash files…as google mainly focuses on crawling through highly raw content on the site…where static and partially dynamic sites got more priority than flash based site, even google crawler was able to scan through the images and its captions and through “alt” attribute of ““.

But still, the truth was google cant crawl through flash files..but now it has become real relief for a lot of people who thought this would never happen….Now google and Adobe shaked hands and started indexing flash files..it can crawl through flash files and capture some content contained in it…still we need to make sure that..google can index our flash files well.

So before leaving everything to google, why cant we take some precautions to avoid this kind of issues..google really loves us..its fond of the content..so google really deserves some assistance from our side too..

First of all, apart form the announcement from Adobe of this wonderful facility..lets concentrate on certain points..to make the flash based site more success among other sites…

• Make sure you embed your Flash using SWFobject so that you can display alternate HTML content. Make sure that the text content in the alternate HTML is as identical as possible to the Flash content. Graphic elements can be described, just as you would describe a photo with a caption or an image ALT tag.
• Some flash content can be build with XML as well, so ff you generate your Flash content from an external XML file, use the same XML file to generate the alternate HTML content.
• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file; but it will not split up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages as recommended above.

But unfortunately, its not time for us to start creating great flash files that can be indexed by google…firmly based on the announcement from Adobe…

Some of the main reasons could be….

• We know that, now google can now crawl through text and links inside the flash file..but have you ever noticed that…a complete flash based site can always contain a single page and from there, the user can dynamically jump to the other navigation sections. But there ‘s something that we need to think…If a site has five html page google crawls through all these pages and finds the relevant content , but is it possible in the case of flash files…Impossible..else google has to cut these flash files into small chunks and crawl through and index them….

• Another point, it can only crawl through static content and not possibly through dynamic content..dynamic in the sense, content that are taken dynamically from an external XML file, its not sure that google indexes these dynamic contents.