The picture I get is that Google is starting to index Flash files properly, and that I should have minimal issues.

Is that a fair enough statement for June 2009?

Duane

While I may have said “could only be visible to Googlebot by having Ichabod change states in the Flash file, therefore exposing “Duane” as textual content” in the video (I haven’t checked it), there are also other reasons why it may come up. In this case though, we do know that the states were changed and I have run some other tests.

The most obvious reason today is that link equity is helping Google find the site tv.adobe.com relevant. This includes that fact that http://www.duanesworldtv.org points at it in addition to many other sites. The reasons you cite are also very likely a much larger impact on the search results now. Another reason is that people searching for “duanes world” also regularly chose to search for “adobe + duanes world” and also click through on the links in the results pages.

I generally agree with your advice though. Too many people spend time and effort trying to optimize Flash for search engines in the wrong places. The Adobe TV site has many errors on it which are picked up by Google too. In fact, if you tried a search on http://tv.adobe.com for “duane”, our own search feature used to not return any results for that search despite the fact “duane” is in text in some of the assets.

Nevertheless, I am glad to have met (virtually) someone else who understands this space as well as you. I am running some advanced tests for determining how well google follows links and how far it reaches into a swf. Additionally, the part that is not yet known to many of us is how Google will actually initially rank from swf content vs the same content from HTML. My tests have unique keywords in both HTML and swf in the same font/size context in two different URL’s/IP addresses. The intent is to see how the ranking works for . I obviously cannot share this as it has to be uncontaminated by people searching and clicking or linking to it. I am curious to understand what weighting swf gets compared to text/HTML.

Another thing I am trying to understand is how far Google will reach into swf’s. Usually about 200 unique words are the limit from most PR <4 sites in Google (of course throwing out stopwords). Initial research has shown that swf might do less but it is unclear because the environment in often contaminated by link equity and click traffic (hence proving that these two mechanisms are the best chance for SEO). Not sure how to fully test this but I am trying to get a range of pages with swf content to get ranked at various level of pagerank by Google then seed the content with terms to see what the threshold is.

BTW – love your blog.

Duane