Googlebot improves its Flash indexing abilities
Google announced on its Webmaster Central Blog on Monday that it has improved Googlebot's Flash-indexing abilities (see the post here). The algorithm tweak, which was developed in conjunction with Adobe, allows Googlebot to index textual content in a variety of Flash files, from Flash menus, buttons and banners to self-contained Flash websites.The Googlebot tweak, as far as I can see, is related to the recently-announced improvements in spidering online forms (see my blog post in May here) where the spider now automatically clicks every combination of buttons, menus, and checkboxes, and submitting words from the site in text boxes in order to retrieve information.
The Official Google Blog commented: "In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find."
Now, apparently, webmasters still have to do this, only less.
The reception to this news has been warm, but with some reservations. Some bloggers, me included, have taken Google's reticence to announce that all Flash content is spiderable to mean it is still potentialy unsafe to use Flash extensively. Until Google announce that ALL Flash content is fully readable by Googlebot then using Flash more than intermittently is a dangerous tactic, given the well-known indexing problems experienced by webmasters whose sites have a large amount of Flash content.
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