Following the recent indexing of flash movies by Google we now find that the Google provides a direct access to the swfs when the developper may want the users to enter through their home page such as index.html

The advantage of entering through the index page is that it allows to provide for centering, adding counters and other javascript. If the user goes directly to the swf then the presentaton may not be what we intended, thus overriding all the html and javascript commands.

To overcome this problem I have done the following:

1 – Index.html is indexed, thus providing Google with the keywords we choose with no follow, thus the Google robot will not look any further than the index page.
2 – Insert Javascipt to redirect page to what is now Main.html
3 – Main.html is with meta tag, noindex, no follow
4 – Embed swf in this new main.html
5 – For existing websites it is better to rename swf to mySwfNew.swf
6 – Create a new swf with the old swf name with only one line of actionscript redirecting to the main.html. Thus if user finds a link in Google to your old swf he will be redirected to you new main.html
7 – All other swfs should be embedded into html with noindex and nofollow.

This seems to work perfectly for those who do not want to index their swfs. Hope this may help others.
Robert

I for one honestly don’t believe that Google or any of the search engine’s should even be bothered with trying to index swf files. The answer to searchability for Flash….or at least for sites made entirely of Flash….has been around for a while it’s just poorly executed for the most part. That is to deliver all of the content that Flash receives simultaneously as HTML to the parent container. A combination of SWFObject and something like SWFAddress or StateManager can then be used to control the interaction between the Flash Player and the Browser. Yes, it’s more work, but in the long run it’s the only method that truly works. I’ve done it successfully and currently have a client enjoying very good rankings with a fully indexed and 100% Flash website that is CMS driven.

I guess in the end my suggestion to Google would be to engage the community before deciding what the best approach to indexing Flash might be. Don’t just pass off a special version of the Flash player to the search engine’s and let the experimentation begin while forcing developers to try and play catch-up without being able to fully understand what’s going on.

About 4 weeks ago I created a test website to see exactly how Google indexes a Flash site with contents coming from diferent sources:
http://seo.matheusgorino.com/
4 weeks later the only thing that Google has indexed is the initial string of my preloader TextField: “0″:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aseo.matheusgorino.com

I’m sure that Google bot has gone trough my website a lot o times because I’m getting emailed everytime he does it. Also, he has correctly crawled another test version with alternative content that I have created in the same day of the simple version:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aseofull.matheusgorino.com

Then today I acessed the Google Webmaster Tools and saw that Google is making a mistake when accessing my main.swf. He is trying to access it on http://seo.matheusgorino.com/http://seo.matheusgorino.com/main.swf witch is obviously wrong.
My test website has a main_loader.swf embed on the html code that preloads and then add to stage the main.swf, which is my main application file.
As you can see on http://matheusgorino.com/MainLoader.as the only thing that I’m doing is an innocent new URLRequest(”main.swf”)… nothing special then.

The Google Webmaster Tools report screen is at:
http://matheusgorino.com/crawl.gif

Weird.

From what I’m reading (but have yet to see in search results) the landing page experience for a Google user will not be too hot. Getting dropped into a text-pull from inside a Flash animation doesn’t do anyone any good. I’d much rather see Google do this only for Flash that allows parameter passing, so that they could deliver you to the Flash, with the correct state.

@Filipe: People do conduct generic (unbranded) searches, but meta tags rarely do the trick on their own. It’s not that meta tags are somehow lacking – it’s just that there’s a lot of competition out there for most keyphrases. If you don’t have indexed page copy, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll rank for a high-volume keyphrase. That’s why this could (potentially) be a big deal (if they get the landing page experience right.)

sil

* http://www.kryogenix.org/writings/tech/lame-flash-scores

Compiled flash is by far secure. There are many decompilers out there, links to external MP3s can be found out by using a simple http sniffer, and if you are linking to a page check for the existence of a session cookie via js before linking (simple external interface call), search engines still can’t run js (not sure about shared objects).