We decided it was time to revisit the topic of Google announcement of its’ improved indexing of Flash and get an update.  Basically, I came across 4 case studies on Google’s indexing of Flash showing that:

1. Since the introduction of support for SWFObject in July, Google hasn’t associated text content in Flash with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.
2. Flash files can accrue PageRank independent of their own parent URLs.
3. Google doesn’t index URLs containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines.
4. Currently, Google doesn’t seem to support translations of text content in Flash.

These case studies continue to show that SEO for Flash can be achieved but only if done properly and then it will have limited value when compared to a site without Flash.  SEO can be done for Flash, but it is not optimal.  The Adobe announcement has not changed the recommendations for the immediate future because:

• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file which is good but it will not split them up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages.  Remember that this can’t use the #anchor because Google will not treat that as a separate URL.
• Google will not run all types of Javascript and this makes it uncertain in the fact that Googlebot will index a Flash file that is embedded using the SWFObject script.
• If you have content dynamically loading into your Flash movies from an 3rd party XML file, this content may not be indexed by Google.

Until this is settled, one of the best alternatives is to make  an HTML alternative that is not only helpful to the search engines, it’s also great for people without the Flash plugin and for disabled site visitors.

Sources for Blog Post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/google-flash-seo/

http://www.yourseoplan.com/seo-for-flash.html

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Optimization and Flash