Today Adobe announced that they've made a special version of the Flash Player available to Google and Yahoo that allows them to fully index rich Internet applications and other SWF content. The content in rich Internet applications is now available to Google, and that means that RIAs should be easier to find in Google. This is one of the main issues that people ask about when talking about rich Internet applications, so its great to see Google, Yahoo and Adobe working together to solve this problem.

More at the official Google blog and on TechCrunch.

Ryan Stewart has a great post breaking down the search engine optimization for Silverlight. Many people still don't realize how search engine friendly Flash is - Google indexes SWF files without any problem. As well, many developers have created applications that allow you to deep link into Flex applications, by changing the URL bar as the application changes. Yahoo Maps is a great example, and there are others.

While Google can index SWF files without too many problems, it will only index the static content that is in the file. If your application goes back to the database to retrieve information, that content won't be indexed by Google. In essence, Google doesn't know how to crawl the SWF file, as it can for dynamic web pages. This is one of the limitations that Flex applications currently have, though some clever developers have developed solutions for it and Google is likely working on it.

Spike TV has launched a new Flex based website that is well targetted to their primarily male audience. The site has an overview of all the shows on Spike TV, a section devoted to pictutes of scantily clad women, and another blog like section that they call "Rant".

From a geek perspective, there's a few interesting items in this application. First of all, the URL bar changes along with the application, another example of how people have solved the deep linking problem in Flash applications. (Check out the links to sections in the first paragraph of this blog entry). Users can send a link to a certain section of the site by copying and pasting the current URL from their browser, just like a regular HTML webpage.

Secondly, the site integrates video from Flash Media Server directly into the application, providing a nice, seemless experience for the end user. No extra plugins being launched or anything, just the one Flash application that loads images and text along with video.

Finally, the site also integrates advertisements at the top and on the right hand side of some pages. If anyone from the site design team is reading this, I'd like some more information on how you did this. Monetizing the work from Flex applications is something that a number of developers would be interested in, I'm sure.

The Guardian has a very interesting interview with Google's Dan Crow, who is the product manager of crawl services at Google. A few highlights that might be interesting for rich Internet application developers building solutions with Flash and Flex:
BJ: Are you working with Adobe to build better crawling data into applications like Flash?
DC: I can't talk about that.
BJ: Because Flex and Apollo would offer a new chance to find a baseline.
DC: Absolutely. That's not an unsensible observation. We clearly need to figure this out... it's not been the highest on our priority list, but in the last six months it has become more so.

Nice. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

Many people think that deep linking and back button support in a Flash application are impossible. Scott Nelson who writes a number of modules for Drupal, a very popular and growing PHP framework for creating dynamic websites like this one, has created a cool website for a client that uses a combination of Flash, Drupal, JavaScript and search engine optimization. The site is for the XXX, and as you can see from this Google index (link removed), the entire site is indexed in Google. Clicking on any of the Google links results in the proper Flash page being loaded, after a quick trip to the main page of the site (by design).

Here's Scott's explanation on how he did this: "I built an html version of the site first to be used as the admin and the indexable content. You can see this by disabling javascript. Then, I use swfobject on the front page to replace the body tag with my swf. For all the other pages, I do a javascript redirect for anonymous users only to the homepage, including a hashed version of the url they landed on. Search engine spiders don't read javascript, so they view the entire site as HTML. When you click into a subpage from a search engine index, you are redirected to the Flash version of the page. Also, the swf includes back button functionality with history, and deep-linking capability. All major browsers seem to work except no back button in Safari."

Have you got any other tips on SEO optimization for Flash / Flex applications?