As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case; however, as Adobe announced that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it until now. Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines. It could add substantial volumes of Flash content to Internet search results, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to provide optimized Flash Player technology to enhance the search said Justin Everett-Church, Adobe senior product manager for the Flash Player. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search.

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.