Google has just added external resource loading to their Flash indexing capabilities. This will mean that when a SWF file i.e. Flash file, loads content from some other file - whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.- Google will index that external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

Prior to this launch, this result did not appear, because all of the relevant content is contained in an XML file loaded by a SWF file.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, It can:

Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.

Discover links within Flash files.

Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.

Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

This means that now it won’t be a big task to get the Flash based sites ranked in the Google SERP’s.

According to Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers of Google indexing team, Google has improved its ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, Google is also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into their crawling pipeline - just like they do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if the Flash application contains links to pages inside its website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Presently, there are three main limitations on which Google is working to resolve them:

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

Google currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by the Flash files. If the Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in the Flash file.

While Google is able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, Google will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.