Update: This post from Google provides a lot of good info.
I’m not sure I made this clear in my previous post so I’m going to try here. A lot of people including Brooks Andrus, Peter Elst, are all either confused or skeptical of what the SEO announcement really means for Flash/Flex applications.
First off, yes, Google has always been able to index Flash content…sort of. They could scrape some text by introspecting the SWF file and pull some meaningful data from it. But that’s about it. This new player behaves much more like a human player. It allows Google’s spiders to click on links, move through states of an application, detect when the URLs change, and everything else a “normal” Flash Player can do. So instead of grabbing text, it’s grabbing text and context for the application. In theory, Google will know that clicking on a button changes the URL or loads a new state and then loads some new text. Before we never had that. There was no context for what Google was seeing because the spiders didn’t understand what was going on inside of the Flash movie to make the state changes happen.
So how do you get your Flash site to the top of Google? No one knows. That’s the same thing as asking how you get your HTML site to the top of Google. No one knows. There are tricks and theories, but Google changes the algorithm and evolves it’s index. The point is that now Flash/Flex applications will have the same kind of context that Ajax applications do according to Google. So we’re subject to the same rules and every Flash and Flex developer should start figuring out how Google treats Flash content. That’s not something they’re going to tell Adobe.
If you’ve got questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to get it answered. But unfortunately we’re in the territory of Google’s search algorithm and there are what, 5 people on earth that know that?
TweetRelated posts: