All of us in the search engine optimization world know how difficult it is to get full flash sites ranking for competitive keywords. Google, for months now, has been saying that it is learning to crawl flash sites.

Now, Google has announced that it can crawl flash sites a little better. The team at Google claims that the integration of Adobe’s Flash Player Technology will help improve the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm.

The official Google Webmaster Central blog claims that all of the text that users can see as they interact with a Flash site can now be indexed.

“If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.”

The blog also warns that there still are limitations that exist. It says –

There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

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.

For me, it is a step in the right direction. However, I would be a little wary and watch out for results before going out there and building full flash sites.