Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to index and rank their Flash pages.

This situation hasn't been ideal for searchers either, as this limitation has kept them from seeing potentially great matches for their queries because they've been locked away in Flash files.

According to Adobe and Google, all of that is changing. Google is launching what they tell me is a "deep algorithmic change," augmented by Flash reader technology supplied by Adobe, that enables them to "read" Flash files and extract text and links from it for better indexing and ranking. This could be great news for both site owners and searchers.

Below, more details about how it all works, as well as some caveats for those who see this development as a Flash panacea and think they no longer have to ensure their Flash applications are search engine friendly.

No. Spiders can't "read" flash...

I read about that. However, I think it will not be fully functional (the same as regular non-flash content). I'd rather go without flash anyhow...

flash for seo is a bad idea, despite the recent news about crawling .swfs (not .flvs). as for crawling .pdfs, google has been having issues figuring out which language a site is based on .pdfs, so hopefully they tone that down a bit. allowing textual elements to be crawled is only a small part in helping with seo, and all the graphical stuff still has a long way to go.

more caveats to flash files being only partially indexed.

... and since people use flash for all the fancy graphics etc, the mindset should be to use all little flash as possible.