“What about search engine indexing?” is one of the most asked questions I get when I’m at events or customer meetings. Not many people know that Google actually already indexes SWF files.

Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Yesterday Google announced that they have now expanded their SWF indexing capabilities.

Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

Read the full blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

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.

• Flex SEO contest: Fellow evangelist Ryan Stewart is starting a community contest to find out more about Flash/Flex SEO. Everyone can enter to win Creative Suite Master Collection, Flex Builder and other prizes. [More info]
• Help out the Flex team and win books and tickets to MAX: While the Flex team itself does work to fix bugs, they are also hard at work innovating on the next release, which means they can not fix as many bugs as they’d like. That’s why they are seeking your help [More info]

Both contests are open to anyone anywhere! And yes, that means us Europeans can also enter!

Update: Google also published a FAQ on this topic

Search engine optimization has always been sort of a nightmare for RIA developers. SEO is always the first things clients ask about these days. And it’s not just a problem with Flash-based rich Internet applications (RIAs). AJAX-based applications have the exact same issues. Just yesterday, I heard of an interactive agency having to really persuade a client that it’s Flash-based site would get picked up by search engines if they did it right. Workarounds like using SWFobject in combination with SWFaddress are pretty common. But you still don’t get the everything indexed. This method basically means creating a hidden HTML version of your site. While this also gives you additional benefits for accessibility and mobile browsers, this is pretty cumbersome to do.

Today we are teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and RIAs. Adobe is providing an optimized Flash Player to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in the Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can be confident it can now be found by users around the globe.

Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are only possible with Adobe Flash technology, without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community who will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.

I’m sure most of you know that static text in SWF was already being indexed by search engines but with this new technology, all your content is being indexed — including dynamically loaded data and different states in your application — without having to change anything!

More info:
Adobe Devnet
Ted Patrick
Ryan Stewart
TechChrunch
InsideRIA