Google Will Now Index Your Flash, Or Will It? And If So, Do You Want it To?

No doubt many web designers">web designers who are partial to Flash will find their jobs will be made somewhat easier as they can begin to build sites safe in the knowledge that they can be picked up by the spiders, though the question for me, as a web developer with an SEO interest, is will the Google spiders find Flash embedded with SWFObject or FlashObject?

For some time, most of us have discovered the best way to get a page with Flash content indexed (and assist accessibility issues) has been use SWFObject to load the SWF into a div containing a search engine friendly version of your content - the idea being, if you have the correct version of Flash, the object will load in the SWF using JavaScript, if you don't, you're left with the non Flash version.  As the non Flash version always remains on the page, you can still get the important keywords, links and content from within your Flash indexed.

Here then, is the rub - as it says in the Google announcement:

"Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed."

Which basically means, this announcement would appear irrelevant to anyone who has previously SEO'd their sites for the spiders benefit.  Of course, you could argue that it's a developer choice, use SWFObject or don't - but considering Google now distribute and support SWFObject it makes you wonder if the various in house teams at Google are aware of each others work, and that they are cancelling each other out!

More SEO questions and issues also need to be addressed, if this new technique will index Flash embedded with JavaScript, is there a chance that our sites will now be penalised for duplicate content?  Do we need to now go back and remove our non Flash content to keep Google happy at the risk of alienating those without Flash?

It will be an interesting development to follow, I for one hope it's all been thought of already, but at the moment Google do not appear to have an answer to the questions raised.