Ever since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of rich Internet applications (RIA), Flash programmers and search engine spiders like Google and Yahoo! have been at odds. But a big improvement has been made recently. A perfect solution? Well…

Search engines are definitely getting smarter where Flash is concerned. Thought not a complete solution, the improvement is significant, and if you’re a Flash designer, worth reading about.

The problem.

Flash is a different type of information in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Flash ‘bundles’ text and images into a complete visual package before being rendered to browsers, which allows the designer a great deal of control over presentation. You’ve all seen images ‘move around’ on your browser. It’s fast, it’s smooth, it’s sexy.

The problem was, since that information is bundled together, it’s hard to get at the text, or ‘Google Food’ that makes ranking your website, well, rankable. Without this Google Food, Flash websites cannot be ranked – a complete suicide mission in terms of online marketing.

The solution

Along comes Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Systems partnered with Google and Yahoo! recently to integrate the Adobe Flash Player technology into the spidering process. This involves Flash SWF files and RIA.

The caveat

It’s not a perfect solution. Search engines have spent long years figuring out how to parse information correctly from various types of standard HTML information. So information in a Flash site might still be garbled or out of sequence, and not render results easily. Google recommends you replace words that Flash designers don’t want pulled with images, words like “loading” – a transition word between one flash screen to another – not a complete solution.

Also, Google will not index together references to external files. So, if some of the information is displayed in one Flash file, and there is another Flash file embedded within that Flash file (like a navigation bar) it will be indexed separately. Again, a tough hurdle to the content issue.

Third, non-English text + Flash is a problem, like when your Flash site is bilingual (with buttons for English and Hebrew). Google says it’s working on it.

Yahoo! does seem to be working a touch harder on the relationship with a few additional initiatives.

However, this is a big world of changes. Chances are that Google will continue to refine the process. Google has certainly extended the olive branch, here.

It’s also probably time that Adobe up the ante and redesign Flash with some ‘SEO friendly’ tools within the Flash development application itself.

Other Articles

• An Adobe Press Release
• Search Engine Indexing for Flash Websites is Improving, by Joe Eitel