The process of indexing flash is more challenging than for web pages for two reasons. With its clearly defined structure, XHTML provides a rich description of content – it identifies headings, paragraphs, and lists and provides a way to assign metadata such as title and description – it is by definition a markup language. Flash is not: flash is a multimedia platform focussed on interaction and experience and providing fewer semantic cues to search engine robots. In addition, Flash supports storing entire applications within a single file, allowing multiple pages of content to share a single URL and thus presenting as a single indexable resource.

According to a Google announcement last year..

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.”

Unsurprisingly, the details of this algorithm are not public, although Google suggest that it is based on Adobe’s Searchable SWF library. While Adobe says that content developers do not need to do anything in order to benefit from the improved indexing of swf files, they do provide a utility called the Search Engine SDK which was originally designed by Macromedia to “provide search engines with the means to search and index Macromedia Flash movies”.

The tool is available for free, but it’s quite hidden on the Adobe website and you do need to sign up to the Adobe Player Licensing Program. The best way to get it is via this link: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=search_sdk. Follow the prompts to sign up and verify your email and you’ll receive a download link.

For anyone not familiar with command-line applications, here’s how to use the tool on windows:

1. Extract the flash_search_sdk.zip file somewhere on your computer.
2. Open the extracted folder and copy the swf2html.exe file from the ‘windows’ directory to a new directory such as C:\swf
3. Copy the swf file you want to convert into the same directory.
4. Fire up a terminal window (in Vista, click the start button, type ‘cmd’ in the search field and press enter)
5. Switch to the directory containing the tool

   cd c:\swf

6. enter the following (where myswf is the name of your flash file):

   swf2html myswf.swf

This will output the html to the screen, but if you’d like to save the html to a file (for viewing in your browser) then simply redirect the output as follows:

swf2html myswf.swf > myhtml.html

While the tool won’t show you exactly what will appear in search engines, a quick look at the output should give you some idea whether all of the important content is visible as text, and conversely whether unimportant text could be hidden (for example, by converting it to images within the Flash).

The fact remains that a good multi-media experience on the web is quite often the integration of flash, video, javascript, html…the list grows.

Google’s inability to provide a solution for users wanting good results for flash and html integrated pages portrayed SEO practice as one that sacrificed the interactive experience that Action Script enables in favour of Googles preferrence for HTML.

Google will read Flash – we’re told

12 months ago it was all over the blogs that Google had built a new and dedicated robot that was going to search through flash content in the same way a user would, and then fairly integrate the pages into the SERPS mix. We waited and for a long while after we saw nothing in the results that Google threw up.

Proof that Google does Read Flash

6 months ago Google got into Flash. We noticed this with a client of ours, Voicenet Solutions, a Hosted IP Telephony provider. They deliver business phone services enabled by Cisco IP phones.

2 years ago a range of interactive user guides on various Cisco IP Phones were created in flash, these were designed to help users navigate the phones functionality through an online interface.

Up until 6 months ago these pages never appeared in the top 100 results for any of the related terms in the content. 6 months ago this changed.

Searchers looking for user guides for Cisco phones were finding themselves at Voicenet Solutions flash webpages. Google had demonstrated its ability to look through embedded flash text and reference the keyword text in the SERPs.

The Impact of Flash reading on Traffic

The impact of this change alone has seen Voicenet Solutions organic search traffic over the last 6 months increase by 300%. The result of this will also have had consequence for the category as the accessibility of this content makes the categories instantly more competitive.

From a design perspective there are still challenges. Google might server the correct flash file to search users in the correct html page but it will always load the file at the start leaving the user to navigate through the content to arrive at the relevant term.

One thing is certain, this example demonstrates Google’s desire to get better and better at indexing the web and deliver the most relevant user search experience as possible. On that thought, I can’t help but to think that Google’s competitors missed a trick on this one.

Top - Flash page is read by Google. Bottom left the results in the Serps. Right - the multiple search terms in analytics