Adobe announced today that it is working with Google and Yahoo! to make SWF content visible to search engines. Although some search engines, like Google, have been able to read the contents of an SWF for a few years, only static content was visible – no dynamic data was seen, making it impossible to make RIAs SEO compliant. Apparently the improvements will take the form of a special version of the Flash Player that plays content specifically for the spiders. Flash Magazine has an interview with Justin Everett-Church from Adobe, in which he explains…

Any time their spider needs to view a SWF file, it will load up this version of the Flash Player and at any given point in the application it will give the text and links that are available then. What Google and Yahoo are doing then is driving that application with a virtual user and they can navigate the application whether it’s an application, website or what have you and keep going down different paths of the file until they feel that they have viewed all the content…

Not sure what the time frame is, but hopefully it will be a step toward making Flash and Flex content more search engine optimized, and eliminate one of the strongest arguments against using Flash on the web. Correction: And then the Flash-bashers will have less fuel for their dwindling fires… Unfortunately, I incorrectly linked to Veerle’s article when I meant to link to the comments section. It was this exchange that came to mind as I wrote this post. And I inadvertently labeled her a “Flash-basher,” which was just a failed attempt at e-sarcasm. Rookie mistake.

If you haven’t discovered Veerle Pieters’ blog yet, you should definitely check it out. It’s one of the first blogs I started following regularly and inspired me to create this site.