SEO for Flash - Google crawling experiment - part 2
To find out about new Adobe stuff I went to Adobe MAX 2008/2009 conference. I was especially interested in session about Flash and search engines and looked forward to finally learn about status of Google and Yahoo flash crawling implementation.
Unfortunately it turned out to be very disappointing especially after realizing that lecturer didn’t know some basic things. All in all whole session was pretty foggy and it looks that we will have to stick to our flash SEO experiment
Lets make summary what we’ve figured out till now:
- How Google indexes text embedded in Adobe Flash?
- Does Google follow links embedded in Adobe Flash?
- Can Google index external content loaded in Adobe Flash?
- Can Google index imported swf files?
- Can Google index Flash created with JavaScript Object?
Google indexed whole content pretty well. All static and dynamic fields were indexed in search results. Mr. Google executed ActionScript as it should be. We tried to trick him somehow but it was not successful
Google is following all links in Adobe Flash even those generated by ActionScript GetURL function.
Yes! We loaded XML using my_xml.load() function. Google indexed that XML but as separate file.
It looks that movies loaded by ActionScript can’t be followed and indexed
I think that was part of official announce of Google/Adobe that Flash created with SWFObject will be crawled. Yes it works!
I hope this experiments makes Flash and SEO mystery little more clear.
Please, feel free to add comments and suggestions for new experiments because we need your brain
Tags: adobe flash, crawling, google, indexing, SEO, yahoo

I’m been searching SEO tactics for flash website, but this is! thanks for this! very useful article!
This is heartening. I’ve always stayed away from flash inspite of its elegance because I thought it has no value in terms of search engine friendliness. I guess it’s time to go back to my books and learn flash this time.
Thanks for this information.
those questions solved many of our doubts as well
Thanx for sharing and taking such important topic which no one else talks about and remained unanswered.
As far as I know BING still can’t index successfully flash websites, but if you think Google is enough, then you’re game
this is a fabulous site, have been following your experiments for some time now with great interest. keep up the good work.
hi , i am going to work on flash site and this is really useful to me. as i bookmark your website for articles. I am thankful to you for quality articles. Hope i get more from you.