How Google indexes flash elements

So in the past flash web sites were discouraged by almost any web marketer/SEO specialist you spoke to. Because of their nature, being in some ways a partial compiled image/video it was tough for Google or any other search engine to index anything from them. The best a person could do was include meta description and keywords tags in the html that surrounded the flash piece. This was not very efficient because early on many search engines placed low importance on those meta tags. They were and continue to be easy to stuff and manipulate with non relevant content.

How have Google, Yahoo, Bing responded to this need?

In June of 2009 Google announced they could index external content linked from a flash file. What this meant is that say a flash page is populated by an XML file. Previously that file as well as the page linking to it would be found and indexed all on its own and the content would be weighted by itself. What happens now is that the pages are connected - they share a rank essentially. Also on that page Google lists what they have accomplished with flash:

" To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:
  • Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
  • Discover links within Flash files.
  • Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
  • Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
  • Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn't particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest."

What is Adobe doing?

In the background Adobe is facilitating crawling of swf web pages. Adobe has provided algorithms that they use to create swf files so that they can be broken down and used by the major search engines to "crawl" the swf files.

Example

One way to see what Google has indexed flash wise with your site is to do a test query. Something like text_from_swf_file site:sitename.com. I did a query of pledge site:levijackson.net as I have a flash piece I did for a class on the Pledge of Allegiance. If you follow the link you will see the second link goes to my swf file. Which is pretty cool, although it doesn't appear the text/letters have been ordered as they appear on my page. Either way whole words and sentences were indexed from the file!

Conclusion

It is still not advisable to make a key portion of a site in flash there are still limitations to how search engines index swf files. There is no doubt that Google is the most advanced search engine and to assume that Yahoo, Bing, or Ask are at the same level would not be a good decision.