Flash SEO....coming to a SWF near you!!

Adobe announced last night that they have been teaming up with Yahoo and Google to give them the ability to better search and index Flash files. Adobe has given both search engine companies a special version of the Flash Player that will allow them to crawl and interact with a swf just like a user would. This will give search engines the ability to see and index any text in you swf, even including button labels. This really opens up a whole new realm for Flash developers. And also more to think about when designing you flash website.

Adobe explains why this effort is significant:

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers, and end users"

Adobe evangelist and blogger-at-large Ryan Stewart sums up the advantages to developers of Flash content with this:

"Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files."

Here is google's latest release about the subject. Improved Flash Indexing

As I said earlier, this really adds great things for the Flash development community, because the SEO side of Flash has always been a sore subject. But now we as developers get to figure out the best way to handle the search ability, indexing, and deep-linking in our Flash apps now.