Adobe and Google made a big announcement yesterday about a new technology developed by Adobe and to be used by Google and other search engines to better crawl and index Flash content on the Internet. Historically, a major drawback for using Flash was the fact that it was almost invisible to search engines. That did not only mean that the content in a Flash file itself cannot be found by Google, but all content linked to from the Flash file was also invisible to Google if the only reference to that link was in Flash.

The new technology developed by Adobe is a special Flash player that will enable search engines to crawl and read the text content in a Flash file as if it were a regular user viewing the Flash file. A search engine such as Google is supposed to be able to go through a Flash file, click buttons, read the textual content throughout the movie, and even follow links in the Flash file. This means that Google should be able to index text within a Flash file and follow links made from within Flash.

The announcement mentions that Flash will be on equal competing grounds with HTML in search engine optimization, but that is not true. Flash has major SEO issues other than merely the inability of search engines to read the text or links in it. A search engine does not usually just tell what website has the information we are looking for, but it leads us the EXACT SCREEN on which the keyword we searched for is. However, in most websites made purely in Flash there is no way to link directly to a certain screen because of the dynamic structure of Flash based content.

Flex (the Adobe tool for creating Flash rich Internet applications) provides methods for creating applications that use components to recreate information on a screen, but an application will not usually call that URL from within the application but will instead use a method to load the content directly onto the same browser window, so that direct Flex link we need will not exist for Google to find it in the first place.

It also means that if Google manages to discover that a certain Flash website has a specific keyword, Google will not be able to point you to the exact screen that has that keyword. This is, of course, better than not showing up the website at all, but it is a major findability issue. It also worth noting that it is still not clearly known what exact sort of text will be visible to Google, Flash is capable of having static or dynamic text directly created in the file, yet Flash is also capable of generating the text using ActionScript. It is also still unknown if Flash will be able to read only links called using the ActionScript getURL() method or just links attached directly to a textfield or using HTML in Flash.

This new technology will still be of a great benefit to HTML websites that use Flash for their navigation, because without this technology Google would have not gone deeper than the homepage if the only means for going inside the website was through that Flash navigation. Now Google can crawl the links in Flash menus and access the entire website.

It is also worth noting that Adobe has made this search engine Flash player compatible with all existing versions of Flash and developers will not need to take any action to make their Flash files accessible by search engines.

You can learn more about Flash Searchablility by checking Adobe’s FAQ on this topic.