Well, at least I didn’t have to wonder for too long……about google searching swfs. In my post yesterday I said I was skeptical, and looks like I was correct in my reasoning. Looks like I completely overlooked one major point of the announcement:
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
Which means, most external content not included. If you have an xml file, it will index the xml file separately, but if you’re loading your data from a database, looks like your out of luck. Even if you use a shim swf to load your main swf, your content won’t be indexed properly.
In all actuality, it isn’t that hard to make your full flash sites search-engine friendly, using any one of a number of different methods. Sure, there’s some extra steps you need to take but most of the time it’s not a crazy amount of work that pays off well.
It’s great to see Google and Adobe actively working on a solution, but the way they’re going about feels like a dead end, unless they figure out a way to really index the site how the user sees it (which in most cases isn’t what’s going to happen with their ‘new’ setup). Maybe we need a way to specify a ’search engine state’ inside the swf, and google can snapshot whatever if on stage at the moment (yes, i can see potential for abuse there, just trying to offer some suggestions). For now, like I said previously, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing for flash seo.
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