It was not possible for search engines to extract content from Flash files, but now it seems things will change.

Google has posted in its blog that it is now possible for it to crawl Flash files. With help of Adobe, they have launched “Flash Indexing Algorithm” that will help its bots to crawl Flash files. This is good news for both site owners and searchers.

Now you can see some Flash sites in top SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Flash was a major source of frustration for both SEO’s and designers. As SEO’s pressurized the designers to limit the use of Flash, and designers loved to include them.

Though, Google has accepted some limitations to this too. They say only text and hyperlinks can be crawled. If you are using text in an image inside Flash, they cannot be crawled.

It is interesting that Google was able to crawl Flash files, but the method was imperfect. Now they say they have got the right algorithm to crawl the Flash files.

Adobe is helping Yahoo! too to implement the Flash crawling technology; however as of now Microsoft’s Live Search is left out.