(Apologies in advance for the use of the phrase “deep-linking.” -ed.)

Findability in Google is a Good Thing.
More and more, Google is how we find everything on the web: maps, phone numbers, deals, and obviously, websites.

But people who make Flash sites have a problem — Flash content is opaque to Google. Google only reads and searches text content (like HTML), so Flash-only websites fool Google into thinking there’s no real content there.

EXAMPLE: 2Advanced Studios, arguably one of the more cutting-edge Flash sites out there, shows up completely blank from Google’s point of view:

Further evidence: although 2advanced has at least 25 different screens or pages, none show up in Google except the homepage. Now we get to the real problem: Google doesn’t even know the content exists.

Try this at home, kids!
To test how Google sees your site, Google the name of your site, click Cache, and select View Cached Text. Or use the “Poodle Predictor,” which does about the same thing.

Daylight Enters the Swamp
Without fanfare, Google recently released a tool for indexing hard-to-reach content, called Google Sitemaps. It’s kind of like a special-purpose addressbook with the phone numbers of hard-to-reach people. Google Sitemaps seem intended for database driven sites where all the URLs are created dynamically. Flash is not mentioned anywhere in Google’s documentation.

Hypothesis: we can use Google Sitemaps to let Google “see into” our Flash content and link directly into our Flash content. By listing out all the URLs to each screen or section within our Flash, we can give Google a map or “directory” of our content so that it can at least be found and linked to.

No There, There
Before we test our hypothesis, let’s take a step back and look at the problem of Flash again. While it’s true that Google cannot “see” the links inside Flash, Flash sites also are not intrinsically linkable anyways. Flash movies tend to have a single URL — the .swf file itself. Due to the variety of ways to build Flash content and poor browser support, various ill-supported hacks notwithstanding, Flash provides no intrinsic way of giving each screen or section of content a unique link.

Come back tomorrow for Part II, where the Code Swami will teach you to build linkable, URL-addressible Flash that will work in any browser.