Scanning Javascript and Flash

[rakhi]

"Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash"

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Most SEO's preach correct management of Java and Flash which I feel is necessary, however does anybody have any idea as to how advanced G's capabilities are when it comes to crawling these scripts?

R

[tedster]

They are currently doing what that sentence you quoted says in the next few words: "...scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages."

Experimentally, there's no doubt that they're working on doing more than just that. But there are practical reasons why more is not yet folded into the algorithm, including opening up a whole new playground for spam that they would need to guard against.

[rainborick]

Google scans embedded JavaScript (and occasionally external .js files) for complete URLs (as in "http://www.example.com/"). They also examine .swf files for complete URLs, but the big difference is that Google will index .swf files by extracting the text they contain. However, since .swf files lack the semantic mark-up capabilities of HTML files and usually have an extremely low PageRank score, they rarely appear in the search results for anything but obscure search terms. You can explore Google's abilities to scan Flash files by doing searches with the "filetype:swf" operator and then examine the sites that host the files that appear in the results.