Google spiders get more clever

Yesterday, Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins announced that ‘they’ve greatly improved their ability to index Flash’.

Whilst it’s a huge step forward (in the right direction, I’d like to add), there’s still no alternative (and I doubt there will be for a long time to come) to textual content being marked up with the correct HTML semantics if you wish for your Flash-based content to be a) accessible, b) on an equal footing with its semantic HTML file counterparts for ranking results (based purely on internal factors in this particular context), c) quick to download… the list goes on. Add to that the ability to aggregate physical files (HTML, video formats) into an XML sitemap, rather than relying purely on Google to identify your new pages through crawling links, and you have still no excuse for not correctly marking up your textual content semantically.

So whilst I welcome this news that textual content and hyperlinks within Flash files are that bit more accessible, I’ll still get a shiver down my spine every time I see any form of text embedded in a Flash file.

This is the Adobe press release on the matter which goes into more detail, and here’s one from Google