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?

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

• Does Google follow links embedded in Adobe Flash?

Google is following all links in Adobe Flash even those generated by ActionScript GetURL function.

• Can Google index external content loaded in Adobe Flash?

Yes! We loaded XML using my_xml.load() function. Google indexed that XML but as separate file.

• Can Google index imported swf files?

It looks that movies loaded by ActionScript can’t be followed and indexed

• Can Google index Flash created with JavaScript Object?

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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 11:17 am and is filed under Playground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.