One Step Ahead: Google boosts flash indexing

Great News! Search Engine King moves ahead of its competitors. According to the official Google Blog , Google search engine robots can easily index flash files.

Until few days ago, it was a very difficult to optimize a flash based website or other flash elements like flash intros, flash banners in a website. Although, the demand of flash websites increased in modern times but only a handful of them could reach the target audience. Web designers made beautiful flash web designs but that did not help in inviting the website traffic. Wonderful flash works were not search engine friendly. Hence, the flash website were usually ranked low in the search engines.

Problem of the past:

Search engine robots usually found the flash designs too much complicated. The flash files could not be indexed properly like simple files. The search engine robots could only index the names of the files. It failed to index the content embedded in the flash works.

Various techniques were employed in order to optimize flash websites and other flash elements. This included Off Page optimization, use of keywords in the right place, use of Macromedia Software Developer and use of proper tags.

Giant leap: Google improves its technology:

Google has taken a big step with its most update technology, which has enhanced its indexing power. Now, the search engine robots can index the content embedded in flash files without difficulty.

It has initiated a new Flash-indexing algorithm of its own. Google has used Adobe’s Flash Player technology and increased its performance. Web designers can take a sigh of relief and build wonderful flash websites.

How does Abobe Flash Player help Google?

The technology of flash reader of Adobe has enabled the search engines to effectively read Flash files, extract text and links. It has enhanced Google to index content in SWF files. Now, Google is able to perceive the textual content in websites that appears to the web visitors.

The new algorithm helps to read flash files like a human. It works in the same method as human being acts like clicking buttons and so on.

The search robots index textual content in flash files and words that become visible in flash files. It also tries to find out URLs that appears in flash files.

However, it must be observed that the search engine king is presently noticing and indexing textual content only.

Present Limitations

No doubt, the new technology has largely improved the workings of the search engine king yet there are certain limitations. There are mainly three drawbacks, which are mentioned below:

1. In certain cases, Google robots fail to index some kinds of JavaScript. In case, the flash file of a web page is loaded using those JavaScript then it will not be indexed.
2. Google search robots cannot index bi-directional languages like Arabic and Hebrew languages as the text is written in a form i.e., right-to-left (RTL).
3. Suppose, a flash file loads different files like HTML file, SWF file etc. The search robots will index all the files separately and never be regarded as a part of the textual content of the site.
4. Google search robots are unable able to index text embedded in the images in the flash files.

It is indeed a big step in the web arena. Now more and more websites can hope to reach the audience through good ranking in the search engine. Google is already working to make things more search engine friendly and enhance the process to rank websites in a better way.