Google/Yahoo indexing flash content

Posted by Paull | Filed under Technology

The Register is running a report today that Google and Yahoo are using an optimized version of the flash player to index text and links inside flash content, there's also more info in a press release on the adobe site.

Google already does index swf files in its results but these results are based around parsing the swf in a linear order and pulling out text and hyperlinks. Whilst it is an improvement over not indexing the files, it isn't a technique which can reflect the order in which the text is delivered to the end user, the priority of the text within the content (there are no H1 tags in a swf!) and it can also index text which has been left in the FLA file but not actually shown on screen. As such the current set of results are pretty useless and rarely feature high in the results.

This new technique actually executes the content in an optimised version of the flash player on the search engines server, this is much closer to the way the content is delivered to the user and means that actionscript affecting the order and display of text will now be executed. Hopefully Adobe will be releasing a version of this player so developers can test their content and ensure it it is working correctly (not that we need another version of flash player to add to our test list).

It will be interesting to see how this pans out, particularly in terms of the quality of results which appear in the search engines results page. Theres no mention in the press release or in google's blog on the subject, of how the player distinguishes between the importance of text in the swf content. For me this is crucial since it such a major part of the way the google algortithim ranks results on a page. My guesses on how this could be acheived are through the interpretation of font weight, size and colour - that would however open up a whole new avenue for SEO and black hat manipulation of search results - perhaps something Google wouldn't want to risk.

For now, we will carry on using Swfobject to replace alternative HTML content with flash movies its a technique that works well for SEO, accessibility and usability. This in itself may actually prevent Google from seeing the swf files as the technique uses javascript to embed the flash files.