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Google Now Crawling Flash Code

Posted Apr 27th 2004 5:29PM by Brad Hill

 Google has indexed Flash files for several months, despite the persistent "don't use Flash" mantra of search optimizers. Indeed, Flash might be a poor idea for numerous reasons. But now it appears that Google's spider is able to see into Flash code more effectively than before, and rank Flash elements in the index rather than merely refer to them.

 Google Flash

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1. Note that this probably only works for sites where the entire content of the site is included in the SWF itself, and I imagine it also has very limited abilities to figure out the internal structure of a crawled file.

For those of you out there who are using content management systems to feed content to your flash sites, don't forget about trusty old . We (http://www.stamen.com) have got HTML equivalents of our site content stored in the HTML and generate URLs for specific site page, and Google appears thrilled: <br> http://www.google.com/search?q=moveon+clients <br> http://www.google.com/search?q=bmw+clients <br> http://www.google.com/search?q=designworksusa+clients</p><p class="credits">Posted at <a href="#c779610">4:42AM</a> on Dec 19th 2005 by <a href="http://www.stamen.com">Michal Migurski</a></p></div></div></div> </div> <div id="subcontent"> <div class="medrect winsubrect"> <div class="innermedrect"> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- htmlAdWH('93217870', '300', '250'); //--> </script> <noscript> <a href="http://ar.atwola.com/link/93217870/aol"> <img src="http://ar.atwola.com/image/93217870/aol" alt="Click here to visit our advertiser." width="300" height="250" border="0" /></a> </noscript> </div> </div> <div id="linkscol"> <div class="skyscraper"> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- htmlAdWH('93218263', '160', '600'); //--> </script> <noscript> <a href="http://ar.atwola.com/link/93218263/aol"> <img src="http://ar.atwola.com/image/93218263" alt="Click here to visit our advertiser." width="160" height="600" border="0" /></a> </noscript> </div> <h3>RESOURCES</h3> <ul> <li><a href="/tips/">Send us news tips</a></li> <li><a href="/contact/comments/">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/advertise/">Advertise</a></li> <li><a href="/contact/corrections/">Corrections?</a></li> <li><a href="/contact/problems/">Problems?</a></li> </ul> <h3>RSS NEWSFEEDS</h3> <ul> <li><a href="/rss.xml" class="img"><img src="/media/rss2_button.gif" height="15" width="80" border="0" alt="RSS News Feed" hspace="1" vspace="2" /></a></li> <li><a href="/feeds/">Feeds by category</a></li> </ul> <a href="http://www.blogsmith.com" id="powered-by"><img src="http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/google.weblogsinc.com/b-c/media/powered_by.gif" alt="Powered by Blogsmith" width="126" height="58" class="centered" /></a> <div class="skyscraper"> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- htmlAdWH('93218361', '160', '600'); //--> </script> <noscript> <a href="http://ar.atwola.com/link/93218361/aol"> <img src="http://ar.atwola.com/image/93218361/aol" alt="Click here to visit our advertiser." width="160" height="600" border="0" /></a> </noscript> </div> </div> <div id="statscol"> <h3>Recent Comments</h3><ul id="stats_recentcomments"><li class="statsclass1"><a href="http://google.weblogsinc.com/2006/01/08/dynamic-java-google-logo/#c22757481">Madhu</a> on <a href="http://google.weblogsinc.com/2006/01/08/dynamic-java-google-logo/">Dynamic Java Google Logo</a></li></ul> <div class="blogroll"> <h3 id="blogroll_header"><span><a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com">Weblogs, Inc. 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