On 18th of June Google announced that now they support Flash indexing with external resource loading.

Quoting Janis Stipins, Software Engineer at Google:

This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file – whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc. – we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

If you didn’t know what kind of Flash indexing was before please read these articles from Google Web Master Central and Adobe Developer Connection:

• Improved Flash indexing
• SWF searchability FAQ

These time this is what is new:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 and AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in indexing process.

Guys from Flash’n'SEO did some experiments before this improvements and you can read their findings on their site.

Waiting for new experiments that will test these new improvements.

This week I’ve been working on a project that uses deep linking with SWFAddress library. SWFAddress is a useful tool that lets you go to a specified part of a flash site by changing the browser’s url.

Anyway this project was in part completed but had to do some changes and fix some bugs. Most bugs were found using Internet Explorer 6. If you wonder why IE6 in the era of Firefox and IE8, because today it has 25% of the market (but going down which is a very good thing) and the client needs to be compliant with it. IE6 is not working on Vista so I had to use a Virtual PC image of XP Sp3 to test with IE6.

The biggest bug found was related to SWFAddress Javascript classes. The site continued to jump from one page to another without no reason. I want to mention that this bug did not appeared on Firefox or IE8 or other browser and I have the following browsers for testing: Firefox, Opera, IE8, SeaMonkey and Google Chrome.

I did some research on Google and I found a comment, “Left by Niklas at Thu, 2 Nov 4:07 PM” on the following page: http://www.asual.com/blog/swfaddress/swfaddress-deep-linking-for-flash.html. That way I found that for IE6 the swfaddress.html file must be placed in the same folder where swfaddress.js resides. That didn’t resolved it then I started to test the examples from the SWFAddress zip file.

I’ve seen that in adobe folder is an approach like mine: use on Flash/Flex Javascript classes with SWFAddress. Tested it on IE6 and is working. Then i started comparing with my project. The difference was that in my project I used also the Flash/Flex history Javascript class. So I removed the following line from my project:

<script src="history/history.js" language="javascript"></script>

That fixed my bug. Two this I had to do:

1. add swfaddress.html
2. remove the Flash/Flex history Javascript libraries

As far us I noticed if you used SWFObject with SWFAddress this problem will not occur because, I think, SWFObject do not uses history.

I hope, in the future, to write an entire article dedicated to deep linking, but I need time for that.

Some resources bellow:
http://www.asual.com/blog/swfaddress/swfaddress-deep-linking-for-flash.html
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

This is a great news! I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a long time. If you don’t believe me that Google is indexing flash try to search on Google by this kind of phrases: “flex filetype:swf“; and you’ll get a list of SWF files that were indexed by Google.

How does Google do this? They explained that they are scanning the SWF file the same way an user explores it, so they are looking for:

• text – is indexed
• external files like xml, txt, etc – are indexed
• button, links, event, etc which are the way to navigate in the SWF file – are also indexed

This new “player” takes the text together with its context (the way it got there, etc) and is indexing it. Images and FLV file are not indexed.

Now that flash is starting to be indexed we will see an explosion of new sites that will use flash technology because this searchability was the big stop for flash to expand. Also SEO services for flash will appear and with every step flash will be equal to the old HTML.

Regarding Flex technology…

Will Adobe Flex applications now be more easily found by Google search, including those that access remote data?

Yes, any type of SWF content including Adobe Flex applications and SWF created by Adobe Flash authoring will benefit from improved indexing and search results. The improved SWF search also includes the capability to load and access remote data like XML calls and loaded SWFs.

…this is a quote from Adobe’s anouncement.

Why now and not earlier? We don’t really know but it may be because recently they published the SWF file format specification for Flash Player 9.

Interesting is that Microsoft is not in this partnership, maybe because they have their own technology which is direct competitor to flash – and I’m talking about Silverlight.

From official Google Webmaster Central we have this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html and please read also the comments… you’ll find interesting things.

Official announcements:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

Other articles:
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1470
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1471
http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/2008/06/30/adobe-announces-swf-searchability/