Google Webmaster Tools has created a page on how they work with Flash and other rich media files.
Regarding Flash, they say: "Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds, including self-contained Flash websites and Flash gadgets such as buttons or menus. This includes all textual content visible to the user. Google supports common JavaScript techniques. In addition, we can now find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. We'll crawl and index this content in the same way that we crawl and index other content on your site--you don't need to take any special action."
And what about Silverlight? Well: "Google can crawl and index the text content of Flash files, but we still have problems accessing the content of other rich media formats such as Silverlight ... In other words, even if we can crawl your content and it is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links."
Enough said!
url: http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&c...
google description: Error #2032. RSL Error 1 of 1.
Any idea??
What's the incentive for Google to spend the same effort on Silverlight?
That is incorrect. Google has a headless Flash Player that they use in indexing Flash that actually executes the SWF, and it can indeed make calls for backend data.
See http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/update-..., and search online for "Adobe Flash Ichabod".
--- Ben
--- Ben
No reports I've see indicate that Google actually index the dynamic content? They have "ichabod" and use it, but figuring out how to present the dynamic content is still their main problem. It's hard to automatically figure out what is relevant from maybe 1000 dynamic responses...
J
My company Yooba does Flash CMS and it is very important to us that this works as described.
Note that they are saying "we CAN index this external content" (my emphasis). They can't possibly index loads of dynamic content without knowing how to present it.
Think about it - how would YOU display hundreds of dynamic results from a dynamic product catalogue in a standard Google listing? It just can't be done, so they have to set limits.
I read another Google article on this about 6 months ago where they explained the difficulties involved and I've not seen anyone post examples that Google really indexes loaded XML. I'd love to see this, so anyone please post links if you find them!
J
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06...
The SWF at http://t4transformations.co.uk/gallery2.html loads in data from a static XML file that clearly tells Google that it is created for CoffeeCup Image Gallery. This is a commercial application (http://www.coffeecup.com/photo-gallery/) and someone at Google must have created some rule saying that we only want to display this and this node in XML for that kind of galleries.
There's nothing dynamic in that example, so if @Sven is betting his business on Google indexing dynamic content, I think he's out of luck. If that CMS produces as SWF that can show hundreds of pages, Google simply cannot make a reasonable search result page for it. The only reason it works here is that it's a statically linked XML where someone have made some rules for what to present as relevant?
J
I would love to see search engines read contents of SWF files, but the technology isn't there yet.