Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 5:20 PM
Webmaster Level: AllWe often get questions from webmasters about how we index content designed for Flash Player, so we wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our latest progress.
About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content. Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities. This work has allowed us to index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, from Flash buttons and menus to self-contained Flash technology based websites. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.
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. 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, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.
While we’ve made great progress indexing SWF content over the past few years, we’re not done yet. We are continuing to work on our ability to index deep linking (content within a Flash technology based application that is linked to from the same application) as well as further improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript. You can help us improve these capabilities by creating unique links for each page that is linked from within a single Flash object and by submitting a Sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.
We’re excited about the progress we’ve made so far and we look forward to keeping you updated about further progress.
43 comments:
Awesome news. As always props to Google for keeping us informed.
Why is it that with all the indexing flash and content within flash, are pages with flash still ranking very low? This of course doesn't apply to nationally recognized brands but to smaller sites that utilize flash. Too many perspective clients have come to me asking why their flash site is ranking terribly low and they have great content that's useful but still low rankings. I can't help but notice that flash offers lower rankings compared to HTML and Javascript offerings...
My two cents....
It's great that Google can now index and follow links in SWF files, but no difference in the inline frame with the SWF file does not? We're at Mekong cruises headache with this problem.
Very interesting initiative given that you do not support Flash sites in your latest search update. Search for Pepsi or even Disney and click on the magnifying glass next to the search results.
We run http://pixlr.com a popular provider of online photo editing services. Our flash based editors now shows up in the result as "video" content? Seems like there is something really wrong, we don't want it to show as a video and the users will be stumped when it's not a video but a application.
Unfortunately at least in my case the new swf indexing has proved to be disastrous due to bugs in google's engine, and destroying my page ranking in the process.
I made a multilanguage flash game. Google indexed it and for some reason it thought one word ('tabuleiro') appears 1500 times in it.
Jifeng/Sverre Thanks for your update.
As Dom also raised the issue, can you comment on if/when support will be available for Flash in Google Instant Preview?
Hello Jifeng and Sverre,
Good that Google team keeps with updates. The new update instant preview do not go well with flash, if you search for Audi USA, you don't get a preview on their site because of flash. Discussion here
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/jagseo/posts/161060170599016
Rgds,
Jag
That's great news!
But in fact I think that will be kind a dangerous weapon for web spammers.
Personally I hate dealing with flash ads or sites - they are loading for ages, flashing, making noises and you always wondering where the heck is turn off music button.
But I believe you guys thought about that already :)
Regards,
Luke
As an ex-Googler involved in webmaster education I'm very disappointed with this news.
I understand there's a need to reach and index all the content out there hidden away in inaccessible Flash files. But the message in this update is however that it's OK to build inaccessible, bloated, and user-unfriendly websites in Flash which many users (e.g those on slow connections + iPhone and iPad users to mention a few) cannot efficiently use.
In addition, you are portraying Flash as a non-problematic medium for publishing content online. The lack of unique URLs, page titles, link anchor texts, content hierarchy, etc are only some of the common issues and factors which make Flash content far more difficult to classify. Compare this with HTML content and it's obvious that the two cannot compete on a fair basis. This is especially worrying since it's pretty clear that Flash websites often face problems with efficient crawling, indexing, and ranking and by endorsing it on this blog sends very wrong signals to the wider community.
Also, the slow loadtime of Flash content is another aspect which is contradictory to Google's latest push to make the web faster.
I find this especially counter-productive for those of us working hard to promote search engine friendly web design and working hard to convince webmasters, developers, web agencies, and marketers why they should invest in accessible HTML websites which would enable them to reach their full potential online.
It would be great if Adobe & Google would let us know what *exactly* is indexed and what is not. For example will FTE based text be indexed or only TextField based text? Will dynamically loaded text/xml be indexed or only static text?
And why not give designers access to the headless player Google uses for indexing. Maybe through an Google or Adobe hosted on-line version? In that way we could see what the Google indexer sees and optimize our projects.
As it stands I am still not confident that my customer's projects get indexed as good as the fall-back code I provide.
I think it is a good thing Google finally tries to integrate with Flash for the results looking at SEO!!
And I don't agree that Flash is "slow", and "worse0r" then HTML!
Although, I still think indexing the Flash sites can be way more updated! Still there is so few data available! At the end every visitor falls fir the visuals... And I say that as marketeer.
Don't forget Google is pro Flash!
For example: http://lifehacker.com/5572597/google-chrome-updates-adds-integrated-flash-player
Could someone at Google please explain:
What are the exact conditions for executing JavaScript and Flash content?
It appears that, by definition, javascripts from a different domain are not executed.
For caching efficiency purposes, I host my script library from a central domain and use this library from all my websites. In an onload event, I do a check for the exictence of a global variable that was declared within the external script and if it's not there, I redirect the browser to an error page.
As a result, Google has now indexed the content for this error page instead of the real content! So it didn't run the external script but it did run the local script!
Ofcourse, I can work around this problem in multiple ways but is there a way to tell googlebot to include certain domains for crawling so that Googlebot can see my website the way a normal visitor would see it?
Our site used flash object in header Also we used jQurery content. Please also keep look the jQuery which really used in future webs.
This is great news for all the SEO guys to do changes according to Google guidelines to make your flash pages crawlable by Google spider.
Awesome!
I'd like to know more about link popularity and Flash. Are the links within the Flash content treated the same as HTML links, do they pass link popularity? Or are they simply pathways to crawl to deeper content?
Does the Flash Search Engine SDK reflect the results we should see from Google? It doesn't look like it has been updated since the Macromedia days?
Definitely good news - though I still won't recommend Flash to any of my clients ...
Too little too late I think.. Have got so used to JS that there seems little need for most requirements in Flash.. I think Adobe should stop being proprietary and replace AS for JS and work on that to take it further..
Now more than ever, it's important for interactive designers and developers of every skill level to use clean coding practices. Go the extra mile and eliminate unnecessarily redundant use of internal assets. Uniquely name the each thing. Google's powerful, but it doesn't make any sense for designer and developers to keep being lazy and then relying on Google to figure it out and untangle the mess.
Simply genius!
Keep up the great work guys :)
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خالد
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Khaled
Great news! I have created an open source flash framework which addresses SEO. If you create full flash websites and want to put highest priority on SEO check it out: http://www.flebframework.com/
Oi. Eu tenho uma ótima idéia para o Google gerar recursos com publicidade por meio do Youtube.
Caso o Google tenha interesse, me procure pelo e-mail, próprio do Gmail.
Inglês - Translator:
Hi. I have a great idea for Google to generate revenue through advertising on YouTube.
If Google has an interest, I look for e-mail, Gmail itself.
Great news! Thanks Google :)
God Job... Thanx Google .
www.saatmatik.com
Very good news for us! Hope this will be very helpful for us.
very good news ... thanks google. ..!!
Indeed, very good news! I'm waiting for further details on how GoogleBot "reads" Flash content and how substantial this developments are. Web technology evolves and Google keeps up with it.
What is the point of putting efforts in flash indexing, when there seem to be lots of effort on migrating (Flash and Silverlight conversion software already here) to HTML5 :0S
I suppose web developers will be now spared of having to use work-arounds, such as SWFObject. The amount of additional work that must go into making content created in Flash at least partly discoverable by search engines, was turning many web developers away.
Good news for older websites, but new websites won't use flash as iphones and ipads don't support it.
bagaimana ya,..
coba saya blom mengerti
This is really great! A best practices or guide for creating search friendly SWFs would be super handy.
For example, what kind of text boxes are readable? Do they have to be the newer TFL text boxes, which have 'read only', 'selectable' or 'editable' as options?
Or can they be the Classic text boxes? Classic can be 'static' or 'dynamic' (dynamic having selectable as an option).
I think a great deal of my SWFs start out 'empty' until the Actionscript calls for the content to load. I've got some cases where the URLs are unique and the Title is created when the SWF loads. If I list all of those URLs in a sitemap.xml, will Google read the Titles of the pages before or after the SWF loads and changes them. If the text content is dynamic, coming from an XML file, will Google see the page after it loads so that all the content is in place?
Anyway, this is very exciting!! Flash is only getting better and it's very cool that Google and Adobe are working together.
I can understand why some people knock Flash, it's a compiled language and requires some effort (time and money) to get up to speed. There are still some people with a 1999 view of how Flash is used, but that's not really a surprise. I'm a fan of standards and all kinds of good web design approaches. To quote a very pro-standards guy (J. Keith) - "In truth, there are no bad technologies. There are just bad uses of a technology"
kaplan asked all of my questions. I hope someone at Google will answer them.
just a user of igoogle but i can find nowhere to ask for support only a list of items to review and search for similar problems
my problem occured as follows a problem (?) caused the display to flash followed by a statement to reload adobe flash player
in trying to reload adobe said that google was using their version of flash further i could not find anywhere to reload googles version and subsequently was advised by google (?) to 'fix' flash player i am puzzled as to how to contact the help process at google
johnsond763@gmail.com
I understand that less flash and fewer graphics will make it easier to get good organic ranking, but can a graphic-heavy, flash-heavy website still get excellent organic ranking? In other words, if you have to have lots of flash, is there a point beyond which you can't offset the negative effects?
In my opinion, the indexing of SWF files will change the way we do business and live of SEO life. I think this is a good statement by Google central is accurate.
Couple questions regarding :
"You can help us improve these capabilities by creating unique links for each page that is linked from within a single Flash object and by submitting a Sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools."
1) When it says "unique links" does that include deep-linking? Does it include URLs that have # in it?
2) How does one make a sitemap for a deeplinked site? Will Google ignore everything after the #?
Any advice would be great.
Thanks,
Chris
In the last few years I have been providing an alternate HTML (duplicate) content behind the SWF. So a bigger audience wil be able to find the content and of course they will find the same essential content both in Flash and in HTML.
This will cause some problem such as cloaking? What's the best solution in this case?
Some update on this direction?
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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