How To Get Your Flash Content Indexed By Google
By Anna Johnson on March 20th, 2009Search engine optimizers have long warned webmasters and Internet marketers against using much, if any, Flash content on their websites because it won’t be indexed by the search engines. That all changed when, last year, Google announced that it would start indexing the text and URLs in Flash files.
Google will now take into account text and links included in Flash content, just as it takes into account regular HTML text and links. It will not index other Flash content such as images or videos, or Flash files served externally (e.g. from YouTube).
If you intend to use a lot of Flash content – even video or image based content – on your website, then it may pay to integrate some text into your Flash files.
Nevertheless, Google’s indexation of Flash text also has some less than ideal implications.
For example, if you have Flash text that you DON’T want indexed, you may want to replace it with images or use a robots.txt file to instruct the search engines not to index such content.
Also, if you’ve followed a practice of duplicating Flash text in HTML, then you may want to remove the duplication (Google, like the other major search engines, tends not to index duplicate content from the same website).
Also, keep in mind that Google’s Flash indexation remains largely untested at this point, while HTML indexation is tried and true.
On that basis, if you’re in doubt over whether to use HTML or Flash, it’s still preferable – from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view – to opt for HTML.
