There is a good news for Flash site developers today, that is Google and Yahoo will index Flash files from now with help from Adobe. This is the biggest hurdle for Flash sites in the past, the most popular search engines can’t index Flash content making it not reachable to the right audience. Of course some sites like Wix implemented a work around but that is not available widely.
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.
Google Webmaster blog has a detailed Q&A on what it can do.
And there are some limitations on what Google can index.
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
