How Google deals with flash

Johannes Beus
Flash and Google are antitheses like fire and water. Searchengines like Google limit themselves to text-searches and are usually not able to read flashfiles. Still, for a long time efforts are made to also index other kinds of documents so that they make sense. For PDFs this already works rather well – needless to say that this is because in most cases they consist mainly of textelements and the interfaces for the PDF-format are adequately documented. In the last few days a few articles on Google's handling of flashfiles appeared. Since this topic is an “evergreen” in the SEO-department, I want to summarize the current state of affairs.

That Google is generally willing to admit flashfiles into the index can be shown in that, at the moment, about 23 million of them can be found. In April of 2004, for the feature's debut, I wrote a short cue on this topic in this blog which means that evidently this is working for quite a while. Like I mentioned before, the Googleindex is only used to text, which means that you cannot just feed it the binary code that flash generates. The usual crawling procedure needs to have a filter added which changes the crawled file to normal text, something that Google can handle.


While in the past Google relied on a proprietary development to make these conversions, they now use the free developers kit for searchengines by Adobe, as has been confirmed by Cutts in a recent interview. Included in this is a program with the fitting name “swf2html” which carries out the conversion of binary- to text-files. I have, just now, put a webfrontend on this conversion routine and put it online: Flash2Html. With this, flashfiles can be tested whether they meet your own beliefs and expectations for searchengine-suitability, before they are put online and indexed by Google.
Johannes Beus - on Fri (01/11/2008) at 07:45 AM

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