Google and Yahoo! improved their indexing algorithm with the help of Adobe to crawl flash sites. Adobe will now provide optimized flash player to Google and Yahoo! to index SWF file content.

All flash files, flash menus, banners and flash sites with textual content and links can be crawled and indexed now. This means any keyword in your flash files can be used to match the search query from search engines and will bring more traffic to your site.

No need to develop and optimize two versions of website, one for users and one for search engine bots. Now flash content can be seen in search engine result pages with flash snippets enriching the user experience.

Though there are some limitations to index flash rich pages, like:

• If flash pages are loaded through JavaScript then search engine bots won’t index those flash files.
• Currently only content in English text is indexed from flash files.
• If there are images in flash files then the text in those images can not be indexed by search engines.

Google already implemented this algorithm and Yahoo! will be updating it in future update to Yahoo! search.

Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google said, “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

This is a big step from Adobe and search engines to show better search results. Win-win situation for Adobe, Google, Yahoo! and all flash content publishers!