According to Adobe in a news release, it has been collaborating with Google and Yahoo!
to share its technology so that these search engines will be able to better index content within Flash, including content in dynamic Flash applications and sites.
Here’s a little history on how Google has dealt with Flash:
Google’s Old Stance – Limited Flash Indexing
Based on an Official Google Webmaster Central Blog entry from July 2007, Google has had some limited visibility to Flash content for some time, but generally advised against overuse for content that needed to be indexed:
“As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. … even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.”
Google’s New Stance – Improved Flash Indexing
Google has now implemented changes to index Flash more thoroughly, as they discuss in an Official Google Blog posting and in a follow up Q & A session on the Google Official Webmaster blog on June 30, 2008.
“Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology…
…Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.”
So what does this mean? Can all the SEO warnings about overuse of Flash be discarded, and all Flash pages and sites become immediately available through search?
Not exactly.
Flash indexing is still imperfect
Google’s first stab at implementing this, as they call out in their Q&A, has some notable limitations:
- If the Flash is loaded by JavaScript, Google may not see it (and Flash is often loaded by JavaScript).
- External resources that are included by Flash will not be indexed as part of that Flash. Many Flash sites will include XML, HTML, or other Flash files/SWFs that are integrated into the content, so this is an issue on many dynamic Flash sites and applications.
Yahoo! may or may not have the same limitations when it integrates Flash indexing.
It will also be interesting to see how some issues on all-Flash sites are handled.
- If a Flash site that has multiple pages is set up as a single SWF file without deep linking, how relevant will search results be? One issue is that the relevance of individual page content may be diluted if all the sections of the Flash are indexed together. If a visitor is linked by the engine to the Flash site home page instead of the relevant content page, there may be a lot of visitors leaving the site right away.
What about SWFObject?
A common approach to embedding Flash is to use SWFObject, which utilizes JavaScript to both embed the Flash in the page and also serves up HTML content to those that don’t have Flash players (and traditionally to search engines).
It seems likely that SWFObject will still make the HTML content available to Google, instead of the Flash content, due to Google’s stated limitations on reading Flash loaded by JavaScript. This has not been tested, and more will probably come out on this topic in the weeks to come.
Sitewire always advises caution when using SWFObject for replacing Flash, to keep the HTML content exactly consistent with the Flash. The SWFObject approach was never officially condoned by the engines, and any black hat activity here may be detected more easily than ever before.
Conclusion - The Future is Bright
This is a very promising development for search. Not every Flash movie in place today is going to instantly be indexed. However, by knowing the limitations of the Google Flash indexing, and following coding practices to allow Google to see the relevant content, Web developers will be able to craft code to be both relevant and visible to search engines. Search Engine indexing technology is likely to continue to improve as well.
Did anyone else notice that Adobe’s release made no mention of sharing their code with Microsoft? 
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