Because we work with clients on optimizing largely- or all-Flash websites, we want to be sure that we fully understand what Google will and won’t index.

So, we formed online experiments, with the goal of answering five burning questions:

1. Will Google index text content inside a Flash movie, even if you have to click within the Flash movie to see this content?
2. Will Google index content inside a Flash movie, regardless of whether it’s embedded with a standard javascript embed or a SWFObject embed?
3. If Google indexes text inside a Flash movie that’s embedded using SWFObject, will it also index the alternate HTML content to that movie?
4. Will Google penalize a page if there isn’t an exact match between the text it finds in a Flash movie and the alternate HTML text?
5. Do the meta tags within Flash (movie properties – title and description, as well as clip properties) factor into Google ranks?

Here are our answers:

1. Will Google index text content inside a Flash movie, even if you have to click within the Flash movie to see this content?

Answer: Yes. We created a Flash movie on Flash Indexing Test Page 2, which displays the word “dogcarpetnail” only after you click on the word “froglipz” in the Flash movie. After waiting several weeks, we searched on Google for the word “dogcarpetnail”, and this is the result we saw:

We can conclude that Google is able to emulate a clicking behavior within the Flash movie, read the text that follows, and factor that in its ranking algorithm. Notice how Google displays the word “dogcarpetnail” in its snippet description, which provides further evidence that it is able to see the text.

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2. Will Google index content inside a Flash movie, regardless of whether it’s embedded with a standard javascript embed or a SWFObject embed?

Answer: Yes. We created Flash movies on two test pages. On Flash Indexing Test Page 1, we embedded the movie using the standard javascript that comes out of the box in Dreamweaver. On Flash Indexing Test Page 2, we embedded the movie using SWFObject, which is a different javascript code (written by a third party), and is currently the SEO industry’s best practice for Flash embedding. . In both cases, when we searched on Google for words that were contained within the Flash movie, we saw the pages in the search results. You saw the “dogcarpetnail” results above. The results for Test Page 1 were for the word “nosegroggle”:

We can conclude that Google is sufficiently able to run both standard and SWFObect Javascript embedding codes in order to find and index Flash movie content on a web page. (As we’ve stated in our Flash SEO Best Practices article, we like SWFObject embedding because it allows you to provide alternate HTML text.)

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3. If Google indexes text inside a Flash movie that’s embedded using SWFObject, will it also index the alternate HTML content to that movie?

Answer: Yes. On Flash Indexing Test Page 2, we included HTML alternate content to display if the viewer was without Flash. This content can be seen in Google’s cache of the page, here:

We then tried searching for the word “yizzlewack” on Google, and this page shows up in the results, as seen here:

We can conclude that Google is using both the text within the Flash move and the HTML alternate text as ranking factors.

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4. Will Google penalize a page if there isn’t an exact match between the text it finds in a Flash movie and the alternate HTML text?

Answer: We don’t think so – at least not automatically. Our pages seemed to do fine although there was no relation between the actual Flash text and the alternate HTML text. However, this would certainly qualify as spam if reviewed by a human being, and we expect that it would be penalized if the Google anti-spam team ever caught it.

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5. Do the meta properties within Flash (movie properties – title and description, as well as image or clip properties) factor into Google ranks?

Answer: Not that we’ve found. We invented made-up words and put them into the Flash movie properties (title and description), the name and description of an image inside Flash, and the name and description of a movie object inside Flash, and none of these triggered any results in Google. We also tried made-up words as titles within the embedding code, and they also did not show up as results in Google. We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google does not factor these terms into rankings.

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The amazing thing about all of this experimentation is that it has had almost no effect on our Flash optimization best practices, which we’ve been following for well over a year! You can read more about how we recommend optimizing Flash in our article, Does Google Index Flash?

The short answer is: Yes.

On July 1, 2008, Adobe announced a breakthrough improvement in Google’s ability to index Flash content.

But – did you know? Google has actually been able to index text content and follow links inside Flash for years. Trouble is, even with the recent improvements, Google and the other search engines still need a significant amount of hand-holding to even do a half-decent job of indexing websites that are built in Flash. That’s why we recommend Flash best practices for SEO.

Flash Best Practices for SEO

To help search engines see and properly list your website contents in their search results, we recommended the following best practices for Flash SEO:

• Use Flash only when necessary, and consider wrapping decorative flash elements in HTML navigation if possible. Pages should degrade gracefully for users who do not have javascript or Flash.
• Build separate HTML landing pages (with distinct URLs) for your separate Flash landing “pages.” Each separate HTML page should deep link to the appropriate part of your Flash movie.
• Embed your Flash using SWFobject so that you can display alternate HTML content. Make sure that the text content in the alternate HTML is as identical as possible to the Flash content. Graphic elements can be described, just as you would describe a photo with a caption or an image ALT tag.
• If you generate your Flash content from an external XML file, use the same XML file to generate the alternate HTML content.

Essentially, for an all-Flash site, you should create “shadow” HTML pages, which display deep-linked Flash for humans, and mimic the Flash experience and content for search engines. These pages can serve as entry points from search engines.

Interestingly, the 7/08 Adobe announcement has not changed our recommendations much. Here are the reasons why:

• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file, and it will even click around within your Flash file to see more content; but it will not split up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages as recommended above.
• If you have content dynamically loading into your Flash movies from an external XML file, this content may not be indexed. UPDATE: We have observed this content indexed as a separate XML file, but not within the HTML page, where you want it seen.
• There is no way to review what the search engines are seeing in your Flash files.
• Using alternate HTML content allows a great deal more control over what search engines see – and allows you to represent the user’s experience of the page more accurately than the search engine’s approximation.

Search engine indexing of Flash is in flux, and we are keeping a close eye on these changes, with the following questions at the top of our mind:

• Will Google start clamping down on alternate HTML content being displayed rather than the Flash movie? This has been a common practice in recent years, but was never officially sanctioned in Google Webmaster Guidelines. With the 2008 announcement, Google may decide that the SEO workarounds are spam – and penalize accordingly.
• What is the best way for us to see what Google sees in our Flash file? The Macromedia Search Engine SDK, which previously provided a rough approximation, is no longer supported by Adobe. Is there a replacement?
• Can content within the Flash file be optimized, with meta tags?

We’ve created a several experiments to better understand the new indexing. Read our Google-Flash-Indexing experiment findings here. If you’ve created something similar and you would like to share your findings, please feel free to contact us.

Future-Proof Your Flash for Google

As we mention above, we do not recommend any immediate change in Flash SEO strategy. However, Google has never officially advocated the common practice (and our current recommended practice) of showing alternate HTML text – and could decide this is “spam” at any time. If this happens, you’ll need to rapidly switch over to a strictly .swf indexing approach. Here’s how to build your Flash so that you can be nimble on your feet if this has to happen:

• Follow the best practices above, but additionally, do the following:
• Optimize your Flash content by matching the name & description in the Accessibility panel to the HTML Title and Meta Description in your HTML page.
• Use actual text in your Flash movie, not bitmaps or vector graphics.
• Make all of your photo images and videos into “movie clips” or “buttons” and then apply the Accessibilty panel to them. Give a unique, descriptive Name and Description to every one of them.
• Read, read, and re-read the Flash accessibility page.
• We confess – we don’t own a screen reader. But if you’re a Flash developer, you should. It’s the closest you’ll get to understanding what a search engine sees in your movies.

With the above optimization in place, you’ll be able to switch off your HTML alternate text at a moment’s notice, and Google will still see an optimized page. Subscribe to our feed and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date on our findings, and future developments.

Read more: Google Flash Test Experiment Findings

This is a test page. We are studying how Google indexes Flash. Formmore information, read our article: Does Google Index Flash?

When you love someone, you want to understand them. That’s why we’re trying so hard to understand exactly how Google indexes Flash. This is a test page. For the full story, read: Does Google Index Flash?

If your website was created entirely in Flash, you’ve got a serious SEO challenge on your hands. Follow this advice to remedy your situation:

Note, this article is really good, and the recommendations are solid. But if you’re looking for  updates based on the 2008 indexing annoucement from Google and Adobe, you should look here: Ask the Experts: Does Google Index Flash?

SEO Challenge: A 100% Flash site, with all content and navigation contained within a single Flash movie embedded in a single HTML page. (If your website was built with multiple HTML pages with some embedded Flash components, your situation is significantly less difficult.)

Why is this a problem? A pure Flash site is a major disadvantage for SEO. For one, search engines will see the entire website as a single page. That means that you don’t have the opportunity to optimize different pages for different target keywords. And you also will not gain the inherent SEO advantage that having multiple pages brings to a website: every unique web page has, by default, some degree of search engine status.

Secondly, outside websites cannot link to interior pages within your site – they are forced to link to your top page. Some marketers think this is great: your visitors will always be led to your home page. But you will not be able to take advantage of “deep links” that could bring more visitors to your site and improve your search engine ranks. Deep linking is when other websites link to pages within your site other than your home page. For websites with an online shopping component, deep linking is much better than home page linking because users do not have to navigate (and risk getting lost!) on their way to making a purchase.

Last, while it is true that all the major search engines can index Flash, the content that a search engine spider will be able to extract from your Flash file will probably bear little relation to what your site visitors are seeing (Read our Ask the Experts response, Does Google Index Flash? to learn how to find out what your Flash site looks like to search engines). For example, consider a simple Flash animation showing a line of text moving across the screen. Your human visitors read it as a single instance of the text. But to a search engine spider, it may look like the same words repeated hundreds of times. This is just one example of the many ways that your text optimization can be thrown off in Flash.

What can be done. Here are some possible SEO strategies to improve the optimization of a purely Flash website.

• Break apart the site. You could rebuild your site, breaking up your Flash file and moving each of the major sections to its own HTML page. Flash elements would then be included as-needed on each separate page. From an SEO perspective, this would be a big help. But if you’re like most Flash website owners we know, you probably adore your website and spent a bundle on it, and there’s no way you’re going to break it up and rebuild it as a hybrid HTML/Flash website.  At the very least, think about this approach next time to you do a redesign.
• Get smart with separate URLs. Even if you can’t or won’t break apart your Flash file into separate HTML pages, you can still reap the benefits of having separate URLs by implementing SWF Address like the very clever folks at Blitz agency labs. The blog tells you all about, down to the nitty gritty details that only Flash nerds will follow. Your users will enjoy the browser Back/Forward button functionality and the ability to bookmark your site, and the “linkerati” will still be able to tag pages on social bookmarking sites and deep-link your site. The Blitz folks called their solution “near perfect” and we are mighty impressed, too.
• Focus on off-page factors. “Off-page” factors, which have nothing to do with the optimization of your on-page content, are a major element of search engine ranking algorithms today. Without making any changes to your Flash site, you can still improve your search engine presence by convincing lots of other websites to link to your site. The clickable text that other sites use when they link to your site will affect your rankings for that text. For example, if you wanted to rank well when people search for the term “Flash Goddess,” then you would ask other websites to link to your site like this: “Mary is a true Flash Goddess.” (See our sample link building request letter for a hint at the right way to ask for links – or read our book, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, for more in-depth advice!)

• Take advantage of accessibility features. Your Flash files can be set up with accessibility features to enhance the user experience of disabled site visitors. These same features may also improve the search engine visibility of your content inside Flash. For example, accessibility features in Flash allow the developer to specify a Name and Description for any element in a Flash movie. See Macromedia.com Flash Accessibility and also this article: SWF Metadata in Flash for more information.

• Create HTML alternative content. Experts agree an HTML alternative is the best option for Flash SEO today. Making alternative content in HTML is not only helpful to the search engines, it’s also great for people without the Flash plugin and for visually impaired site visitors. Making alternate HTML content might be easier than you think, especially if you are using XML to feed content into your Flash files – you can feed identical content into an “alternate” space on the page.  Specifics of how to set this up  can get a little technical – see deconcept.com, “A Modern Approach to SEO for Flash” for detailed instructions.

• Create an HTML addendum. As a last-ditch-scenario, if you don’t wish to – or can’t – get your site to show alternate HTML content, at least create some alternate pages that users can manually click on. Beneath your Flash movie, add a standard HTML link or links to your most important content in HTML pages such as “Our Products,” “About Us” and “Contact Us.”

A Flash website has features that you just can’t get from other technologies.  Follow the tips above and you just might be able to enjoy the benefits of Flash without suffering a major SEO downside.

Slow down, Hoobie! And watch out for that Birkenstock.

This is an SEO test page. We are learning how search engines index videos on the web. For more information please read How to Get Video Thumbnails in Google.

Lucky the Rat Joins Hoobie – but is he a friend or a foe? Only the Marlboro Man knows.

This is an SEO test page. We are learning how search engines index videos on the web. For more information please read How to Get Video Thumbnails in Google.