Google can now index the text within Flash presentations, so SEO professionals no longer need to resort exclusively to
copying text from the flash file into HTML text. As long everyone understands how Google sees the text within Flash presentations a site can
have Flash components and indexable content.
To confirm Flash content searchability you can enter your search term in Google,
and use the filetype operator and restrict your search to the file extension ".swf". Along with your search keyword(s) you wil be able to search
exclusivly within in Macromedia Flash files. You should see [FLASH] just before each listing in the results page that is a Flash document.
But this only shows that Flash content is indexed, and points out by limiting the search to SWF files, these search results would normally appear in much lower search result pages.
The text must also be static inside the SWF file (as opposed to being created on the fly via some external source) which therefore excudes more complex Flash "applications". I still believe that it is best to
have some Flash content as a module and some visibile HTML which benefits the user, not just the search engine spider. Using this approach the content should appear higher up in the search result pages.
It is not certain what tools Google is using, their own or
Macromedia's Search Engine SDK but it is clear that SWF file content is being indexed.
How does the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK work The SDK includes an application named ‘swf2html’. Swf2html extracts text and links
from a Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static
library for linked library implementation.
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