Today Adobe announced that they have released special versions of the Flash Player to both Yahoo and Google. This is an amazing update in SEO accessibility for Flash and Flex. These special versions of the flash player allow their spiders to crawl Flash content just as they would HTML. These special Flash players actually will use your SWF and move through the different states of your clips and content! The spiders actually will also be able to gather Meta data from the SWF as well. You do not have to do anything to your SWF files to ensure that they will be crawled.

In the image above you can see that I searched Google for “pixelfumes filetype:swf“. It returned:

[FLASH]
71px Start Demo 71px import com.pixelfumes.reflect.*; var r1 …
File Format: Shockwave Flash
import com.pixelfumes.reflect.*; var r1:Reflect = new Reflect({mc:box_mc, alpha:85, ratio:255, distance:1, updateTime:0, reflectionDropoff:1}); …
www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/reflect_class_as3/fig03.swf – Similar pages – Note this

In this example from my Adobe Developer Connection Article, I have a static text field on the stage displaying some code that was used. Apparently, Google was able to index the SWF’s text (static in this example).

Ryan Stewart has a great video on the subject (from which I gleaned the majority of my info). Basically, since the SWF format has been opened, Google and Yahoo now have a completely exposed DOM for SWF content just as they have had the same for HTML content. This is huge!

Two REALLY big things that you should know come from the Google-related release:

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.

Those are two things that I personally do all of the time – this will be interesting…

Below is Ryan’s video:

You can learn more about all of this from Google itself by reading their post on Improved Flash Indexing.

Ryan also has a FriendFeed room link available as well here so that you can follow the questions and discussions that are going on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.