Do Search Engines Index Flash?

For years the problem with Flash has been that it is practically invisible to search engines. What use was your beautifully designed, interactive web experience when the end user couldn’t find it?

Sure there are best practice guidelines, html tips and JavaScript tricks, but wouldn’t it be better if the search engine spider could just ‘see’ your content?

Well, maybe it can. Adobe recently announced that it has teamed up with major search engines – including Google and Yahoo – to “enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines”. Google added in their blog that they had already begun indexing Flash content on websites.

Excellent! So now we can embed flash functionality everywhere! Unfortunately, no.

While your SWF files can now be crawled, the spider will only see plain text, labels and links, and there is no detail given on what weight these carry in page ranking calculations. The spider remains ‘blind’ to images, FLVs, vectors and dynamic information. There are no SEO staples like headlines, paragraphs or alt tags, and plenty of Flash isn’t even crawlable because Google won’t execute the JavaScript many sites use to load it. But it can read text, and that’s something.

So the searchbot’s Flash-blindness isn’t entirely cured, but it has received a rudimentary pair of plain-text viewing spectacles, the implications of which should not be underestimated. And let’s not forget those tips, tricks and guidelines either:

• Visit the Adobe Flash accessibility page
• Use SwfObject and create alternate content so that everyone can view your site in some form
• Split full flash sites into separate html pages. Use XML and FlashVars to maintain consistency and style.- Use actual text in your movie where possible
• Use xhtml content injection with flashvars to inject html text as variables in your SWF
• Create useful title and meta description tags for the page holding your SWF
• Do not forget the importance of links - see how many major brands use a full-flash site, barely bother with SEO and are still ranked number 1

Yes search engines now index flash, but no, this doesn’t signal the beginning of a new wave of rich-media dominance, or give you an excuse to Flash-ify every part of your content. For most, Flash SEO is essentially the same as before, just a little bit better. And I fully expect it will get better still.

Mark