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Who would have thought the day would come where Google's robots would be able to index content out of Flash files? Well now it can!

Google announced on their blog today that after working with Adobe to better integrate the Flash technologies into their crawler. The benefits of this have been shared with Yahoo, and it should mean that the pair of engines will soon be able to fully index content from any Flash based site, or even just indexing small bits of Flash used for text or menus. As well as indexing the content of Flash files (SWF) it will also look for URLs embedded within them as links. This will probably mean that we'll be needing the equivalent of rel="nofollow" for Flash quite soon. However, only URLs associated with text will be indexed, URLs attached as links to buttons or images will not be.

For now at least, FLV files will be ignored as they typically contain no text elements that can be indexed. According to their blog they also have a few limitations still that they are working to resolve:

1. 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.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your 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 your Flash file.
3. While we are 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, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

But it's good news for Flash developers anyway!