Flex 3: Will Google Index Content that is Only Visible After Clicking a Button?

Question

Will the Googlebot "click" buttons on a Flex 3 site when it indexes it?

I've got a Flex 3 site. When the user clicks one of the buttons on my site, a panel opens and text appears. As the text is not immediately visible, will Google index the content in the panel? (I'm not cloaking or anything weird. It's just the normal functioning of the site).

Are there any Flex 3 developers out there who see Keywords listed in Google Webmaster Tools for text that is visible only after clicking a button?

Thank you.

-Laxmidi

Answer 1

Straight from google itself:

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file? We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files? Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Answer 2

In short I haven't actually seen this working on my own projects (though I don't target SEO) Adobe acquired Omniture an SEO company recently and the people at Google are smart, so I don't doubt this will be progressing nicely in the near future, more info and experiments can be found here:

http://www.flashnseo.com/

http://www.omniture.com/en/

I don't think there is a clear answer to this one since it's in flux and Google can't disclose exactly how their algorithms will work, but as stated in the other answer here I'd imagine if the information is still represented as text in the swf, they'll find a way to dig it up, in terms of how your site will handle deep linking, that's still on the developers (although I've got my fingers crossed that between Adobe and Google they're able to ease the pain on us).