As many in the search engine optimization world know search engine spiders weren’t able to see what was in a Flash file in the past. This has always caused some grief when deciding what to put on web sites because you wanted the search engines to see you and still be able to make a visually appealing page. This invisibility that was created by people using Flash sites has been a big setback for companies using rich applications because they weren’t able to use SEO to their advantage.

Now all of that has changed. Recently Adobe has announced that they’ve invented a way for search engines to read the Flash files so that all of the information in them can be indexed. Adobe’s Vice-President of Marketing Michael Turner said this about the release, “We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.”

For anyone that works in Flash, this is a giant step forward. The way the new program works is that a special Flash player created by Adobe for the search engines acts like a virtual user for each application. These “virtual users” completes the entire runtime of the Flash applications and then translates what happened for the search engines to understand.

Google has begun putting out the Flash indexing tool, but Yahoo reportedly still has some work to do before they can do the same. Turner warns that even with this technology there will still be some problems with the Flash content and search engines. Mainly the idea that it will still be tough for an average webmaster to link deeply into Flash files. Without that ability high rankings are still unlikely for Flash files.

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