Exciting news resonated through the Twittersphere today as Google announced that they’ve now added the ability to index external resources for Flash sites and applications.

When your Flash based site or application loads content from another file (text, HTML, XML, script, another SWF, …) Google can now also index that external content.

While Ichabod – the headless Flash Player that Google uses to enable this – offers even more functionality than what Google offers today, this is obviously really exciting news. If you want to learn more about Ichabod, definitely check out Jim Corbet’s session from Max 2008.

Read more about Google’s implementation on Google’s Webmaster Central.

Flash on!

Update: According to Google’s blog, it seems that this is now limited to AS1 and AS2. I’m trying to find out more about that. Will keep you posted.

Update: Google confirmed that they also index AS3 based content. They also updated their blog post.

SEO for Flash based sites and/or applications has always been a hot topic. Depending on the source you’ll very hear different opinions. That’s exactly why Belgian based agency Nascom did their own test a few weeks back. They came to the conclusion that Google can index Flash. You can read more about their test and their findings on their blog.

If you want to find out more about SEO for Flash, you should also check out our recently launched SEO Technology Center. While Adobe and the leading search engines are making significant strides in making SWF content more searchable, you can take additional steps now to improve your search ranking positions further.

The SEO Technology Center helps explain what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.