transparent flash seo: still a way off

I’m getting mixed signals here about Flash SEO. I read Ryan Stewart’s post on Flash SEO. This passage stood out:

We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application.

That sounds like you can now treat Flash “the same way” as HTML, in the common sense meaning that if you see content as a user, it will be indexed by the search engine; he doesn’t say so (he’s talking about the technology Adobe provided, not the use the search engines are making of it), but you could be forgiven for reading it that way. If I hadn’t already read a more informative article from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, I would have read it that way myself.

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.

So let’s consider for a moment what that means. Google will see your SWF and any XML data as separate resources. Which presumably means that if I go to Google and type in a passage of text that appears in my Flash site, I will be directed not to the SWF but to the XML file, or the output URL from the backend that delivers the XML - either way, to the end-user, a mess of angle brackets with the content nested in it.

That’s not what I want at all! And I certainly don’t want to start embedding text into Flash movies just so that Google will be able to index it properly. I will need to continue to include data from the backend in the “noscript” section of the HTML, in the same way as previously … except now the two sets of data will in a sense compete with each other.

Until Google fixes this problem, transparent Flash SEO (by which I mean that we can just concentrate on content and not worry about technology) has still not arrived.

On a side note, Peter Elst points out some possible problems that the indexing of SWF content might cause, echoed by Aral Balkan: crawlers following URLs found in SWFs might cause unintended side effects.