That aside, as with nofollow, a few posts from Matt will suffice to spread Google’s desired techniques around the web.

@Anothony: it is precisely because I am a professional SEO that I need to block out the ill-prepared, unauthorized flash content  from search engines. I’ll pass on every opportunity to “make the search experience for multimedia better” when it profits someone else at my or my client’s expense (as this currently does). I could go on for days with specific reasons why I can’t trust Flash and Google right now, but suffice it to say that until we know what Google is doing with whatever it finds inside the Flash, and we know what the designers are doing with whatever is invisible inside the flash file, we professionals cannot afford to assume the risk of including that in the page content. Nuff said.

The real question raised by this new development is “HOW is Google indexing Flash sites?” How will it interpret the text it finds within Flash files and assign relevance? There are no standardized links or tags (like <a> tags or <h1> tags) in Flash that relate to semantic significance. The reality is that as much as I long for the day that Flash sites are on equal SEO footing with non-Flash sites, that day has not come (you can see my blog entry for more thoughts on this).

I do disagree, however, that we should block Flash sites from being indexed. I think our job now is to get the ball rolling with Flash indexing which will hopefully speed the development of both Google’s ability to index Flash sites properly as well as a more standardized set of Flash programming standards for SEO. Instead of waiting for the ideal scenario to be developed (by Google or Adobe or anyone else), I believe we as SEO professionals need to take an active role in creating the ideal scenario, and that means mucking about with messier solutions until we get them into a clean form.

It would be such a tremendous boon for users to have all Flash content (including animations, videos, etc.) properly-indexed, I think it’s worth the extra effort on our part.

@Eric: As a Flash designer, you have the right perspective. As an SEO, so do I. And when we both understand better what Google is doing with the Flash content it finds, you and I can work together to  win the SERP wars for our webstes and our clients. Until then, I don’t trust Google, I don’t trust that your Flash properly represents my page to Google, and I can’t afford to just put it out there and see what happens. In fact, it is precisely because so many designers are willing to just put visual things out there without concern for their extra-visual impact (especially with Google’s rankings), that I am so busy these days. As for getting the ball rolling and hopefully speeding the development of Google’s ability to index Flash, that’s a great job for test sites and perhaps PR-centric sites intended to praise/embarass Google when it gets things right/wrong. But that’s not for real websites. Until Google gets way more transparent about its indexing and ranking of  websites, Flash is a risk for anything dependent on Google search traffic.