What does google spider in the flash file?

[4string]

Does G index text blocks in the frames? What about AS? What about frames in the movie which don't get played?

Does anyone know how Google "sees" the flash file? I'm quite curious.

4

[moltar]

Does G index text blocks in the frames?

If you are talking about HTML frames (

<frameset>

) then the answer is yes. If you are talking about Flash movie frames, then the answer is no.

What about AS?

AdSense mediabot? Same story as above...

What about frames in the movie which don't get played?

Same thing...

Does anyone know how Google "sees" the flash file? I'm quite curious.

Googlebot and other spiders probably do see it, but ignore it completely.

I guess the biggest problem with indexing flash is that it can't link directly to the content. It can show you the begining of the flash page, but how would it point the interface into the correct frame? Some flash sites have hundreds of pages.

[4string]

Thanks for the reply. I meant actionscript (AS). Sorry, I should've been more clear.

I see when you publish the swf and it makes an html file for you, it adds some stuff like:

<!--url's used in the movie-->
<!--text used in the movie-->
<!--
my text from text box
-->

And so on. Google definitely seems to pick up something about the file.

[Richard_N]

the comments that flash places in the html page allow you to manually place the text in the page nd thats all.

The solution we use is to either:

1) place the text in an external text file and call that into a hidden <div> at the top of the page by way of a phpinclude statement

2) place a link in the hidden div to the text files (if there are many) so they get spidered

or lastly

manually add the flash file text to the hidden div

Each method provides the spiders with a means of picking up the text without having to worry about flash and search engine issues.

[4string]

I'm always scared of hidden anything. Are there any ill effects from putting in hidden divs? I'm sure you could make a case to google if you got kicked out, but I wouldn't want to deal with it.

[Richard_N]

no were not trying to confuse google, just give it the information it needs. The text is written as per the site and google would not know the div was set to display none anyway...

[jonte]

Googlebot is actually able to spider Flash files. I don't know exactly how good it is at it, but my guess is that visible text in a Flash movie will be picked up by googlebot.

Play around with the filetype operator in Google to figure out exactly what it is spidering.
E.g.

"some text" filetype:swf

Jon