To fully understand what changed we have to know how Google indexed the SWF format before the new flash player for search engines. We had all heard rumors from one source or another but nobody knew for sure what was indexed or not. So I sat down and made fourteen test cases to try to shed some light on Flash and Flex SEO (test cases 1 to 7, test cases 8 to 14). In each of these test cases I would put a unique search expression that I was sure had no result on Google. Here is a list of what I learned from these experiments:

• Most of the content that was on the stage/timeline at compile time would be indexed even if it was outside the viewing area.


• The TextArea, Text, ViewStack and custom MXML component in Flex would get indexed if they were in the MXML (I guess that is the Flex equivalent of being on the stage) but the Label component would not.


• SWF files embedded in the HTML using JavaScript (SWFObject, AC_RunActiveContent, etc) could not be found on Google.


• Anything related to the ActionScript 3 method addChild would not get indexed. As an example, adding a MovieClip from the library with static text in it using addChild method would not show up in Google’s search results. In the same way, using States in Flex wouldn’t work. My guess is that since States uses addChild in its MXML syntax, once compiled, it would get converted to the addChild method in AS3.


• Finally, any content loaded externally from the embedded SWF file wouldn’t get indexed. That wasn’t a conclusion of my experiments but was clearly stated by Google.

What changed?

On October 14th, I noticed a change in the search results of my pages made for the experiment. If you now search for the unique expression in the content of my 14 test cases, you will be able to find 12 of them on Google. That’s just two more than before, but you will have to observe some weird behavior.

As a matter of fact, some test cases keep changing between being indexed or not. As an example Test case number 7(Text component in Flex) was indexed two months ago, last week it wasn’t and now it shows up again. The same goes with the experiment about Flex’s Label component. I suppose Google is still fine tuning its algorithm.

What is really interesting is that last week I saw two test cases on Google that had never been there (4, 8). From those you can deduce the following changes:

• Content added using the ActionScript 3 method addChild is now indexed. This includes content in Flex’s States.


• Content in a SWF file embedded in the HTML using SWFObject 2.0 dynamic way (using Javascript) can now be found in Google.

What does this means in the every day job of a Flash developer?

Well it might mean a lot. It might mean that the content that they are putting on the web will find its way on search engines and that more people might experience it. I say “might” because lots of unknowns remain. All my test cases were really simplistic and where done that way because I wanted to isolate variables to see what could prevent content from being indexed. I don’t think it represented the entire spectrum of ways that you could build a Flash/Flex website or application but all in all I think it gives some hope for the future.

One area that my experiments didn’t cover was in relation to loaded/external content and this is a pretty important area. If Google also starts to index loaded content, then flash developers might start building websites while keeping search engine optimization in mind. In order to fill the gap in that area, I’ll make some new test cases in a couple of days, to uncover what happens with external content. Stay tuned.