Adobe teams up with search giants Google and Yahoo to solve one of the longest standing problems with Flash… being invisible to search engines. With a special Flash Player, that acts like a virtual user, full text can now be extracted from all Flash swf files on the web for indexing.
This is a big deal in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world and is pretty much an open slate to Flash developers to figure out what is going to return the best page ranks and results. It’s great to think that HTML and Flash will soon be on a level playing field for big advertising and analytic dollars.
Despite that I see this as great news, I don’t see any short term changes in how SEO is going to work for websites that require SEO in the first place; especially if you consider the fact that Google has already stated that they will “not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files”. Last time I checked big important data driven Flash sites and RIAs are using all kinds of external data (ahem… XML, hell even other swfs) that Google is saying it will index separately. The bottom line is there are practical issues that are not worked out yet and furthermore, if SEO is critical to any Flash site you’re best using some kind of HTML frame at least for the time being.
