On the first day of this month, we reported that Google and Yahoo were to begin indexing Flash files. According to the pertinent Google Webmaster Central blog post, Google is able to crawl the contextual elements in these blog posts. The post itself has been updated with Google mentioning that it rolled out even more features:
For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.
Those using SWFObject should appreciate this new functionality. But there's one concern expressed by tedster. Hopefully, the spiders won't ignore HTML content on those pages that also utilize SWFObject.
I use SWFObject to serve alternate HTML content to user agents that are not flash enabled. So I certainly hope this change doesn't mean Google starts to ignore the actual HTML! I can't imagine that happening, at least not intentionally.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
