UK Search Engine Marketing Agency
Google and Yahoo to index flash content
Software firm Adobe has announced moves to make Flash content show up in search results on Google and Yahoo.
Currently, the search engines cannot index content that is displayed via Flash, as the software appears like an opaque box to Google and Yahoo’s crawling software. This means that lots of sites that use Flash have been missing out in the search engine rankings.
Webpages designed using Flash can display photos, animation, videos and text, and Adobe is providing the two search engines with the software code to help Yahoo and Google to see this previously hidden content, though some elements of Flash content will remain hidden.
Now Google users will be able to search through code within the Flash file itself, as well as on Flash banners, buttons and menu, while Yahoo plans to update its own indexing.
According to Google’s Ron Adler and Janis Stipins:
"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. Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets."
According to Adobe, Google is already beginning to serve up search results which include Flash files, while Yahoo will update to its search engine soon.
