Can Google index Flash files ? Yes, and beyond !

We’ve discussed already at several posts that flash necessarily doesn’t mean bad SEO. In fact, Google had updated its bots long time back to detect and index flash files, their content and even spider links from them. Earlier, flash was a big no-no in SEO.

So what’s new with Google and Flash ?

Google has once again updated its bots so that they can now not only detect and index flash content but also go further ahead and index other files embedded in them, and it can detect any regular file type like txt,swf,xls,doc or just about anything.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, it can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

So does that mean you can have a full on flash website, of course yes, it doesn’t matter as all the content would be accessed by Google, but when it comes to competition, may be you want to go for alternatives with more options, say HTML ?

Official declaration from Google on how their bots treat Flash !

Familiar with any of these icons ?

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