Google can now index flash sites!!! *MAJOR NEWS*

Nice link rtm223 ... Definite proof that Google indexes Flash files.

I find it interesting there is no cached link on those pages, and I have yet to see a Flash backlink.

More research is needed ... maybe they consume too many resources to get the full treatment?

This is great news, I knew soon or late search engines will start indexing flash sites properly.
Temi

This is pointless for a large flash site. Until flash developers make use of the browser back button and have a separate flash page per page... but then what’s the point its better to have flash embedded onto HTML - HTML text can look sharper and is more usable too.

I don’t want to be served up a large flash site and enter via the homepage needing to then find a needle in a haystack.

Don’t think me a buffoon I have actually worked on commercial 100% flash content driven by a database websites and both of them had to scrapped after a year or two because of many issues.

That sounds right to me. Looks like google is stripping text from the swf, and caching that. Mostly because that is all they need for rankings.

Something that just occured to me RE those people that can't get their flash text cached. At least some of the pages that are in the results page I posted are linked using a normal <a> tag (I happen to know that rathergood.com does and the e-card type ones most likelly do as well. I'm not sure how to check if all/most of them are though). Google finds it more difficult to index html pages embedded in another html page (frames), so would it not make sense that a .swf embedded in a html would be a similar barrier?

Of course this is merely speculation so I'd like to get other people's thoughts.

Google can index frames and it has been doing so for a long time now however just like frames I still think flash in unusable for content... its a step forward for sure but Google are going to need to set some guidelines such as fonts should not be converted into paths, how deap does it index etc...

This is not the same problem .... frames had the problem of multiple documents (with different docIDs) appearing on the same page. In effect one page with multiple addresses.

Flash files are more like graphic files ... content on a page ... and do not present the same kind of barrier.

The problem is probably due to size, and the resources needed to parse info from these files. You have to remember Google tries to index billions of pages every 24 hours. How much time can they waste downloading one flash file (200k ... 300k ... 500k), hoping to get two or three words.

That explains a lot...PR would be messed up if it were 3 or so doc id's pointing to the same address.

Or worse yet ... one docID pointing to three addresses.