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In a rare multi-company multi-blog announcement, Google and Adobe have released their latest update which may help resolve the age old Flash / SEO question. For years, Google and other engines have had issues extracting information from Flash. That may be nearing an end with todays announcement and the public disclosure of Google’s “Flash indexing algorithm”.

According to Google they’ve greatly improved indexing for Flash and in particular SWF files ranging from gadgets, buttons and menus to entire websites. Basically, Google can now extract more text within Flash files and generate snippets for websites based on text they’ve extracted. The new Google algorithm for Flash also opens up the potential for Google discovering URLs contained within Flash and therefore possibly even extracting anchor text for links in Flash. Seems this anchor text could later be associate with links.

At the same time, Google’s ability doesn’t seem to have increased when it come to extracting images, text images and/or pseudo “text” within FLV files. Images are a major concern for search marketers as they’re included as part of Google Universal search. In other words, text still can’t be extracted from your favorite YouTube videos.

How is all of this possible? According to Adobe, “Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. “Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.

“Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn’t better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It’s great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief, SearchEngineLand.com.

Without going into to much detail, Google’s new process for Flash works similar to the way users interact with Flash and no action is required for indexing. Either way, it’s confirmed that Google can now see your content in Flash. Google ends their announcement by outlining the remaining limitations:

1. Googlebot still lacks some support for Flash in JavaScript.

2. External XML content loading into HTML source pages won’t be associated with the source URL which is a KEY factor for SEO.

3. Google can’t translate Flash content into Hebrew or Arabic.

More from Adobe, Google Webmaster Central & Google Blog

As reported on Blogoscoped.com, it’s official, Google’s AdSense Referrals program will end the end of August 2008. According to Google, they are “constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers.” To that end Google offers several options for current AdSense Referral publishers:

* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.

* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

In Google’s email Monday, they suggested removing all referral code from sites prior to the last week in August. In addition, Google suggests saving account information for future reference as AdSense Referral code will no longer function after the last week in August 2008.

UPDATE: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/06/were-retiring-adsense-referrals.html

Available by invitation only, Google Ad Planner Beta is a new tool intended to help online marketers identify websites of interest to their particular audience. Google Ad Planner provides marketers with research and allows users to create media plans. In addition, Ad Planners can define target users by demographics and interest. Google AdPlanner allow advertisers to search for websites relevant to their site’s visitors and access aggregated statistics for unique visitors, page views and other data compiled about millions of websites in 40 countries. With this information Google hopes advertisers will create and save their own advertising plan using Google.

Data for Google Ad Planner is provided via Google’s automated analysis of search query data as well as site visit data. While Google Ad Planner uses estimates, the data provided is accurate for directional trend analysis and updated regularly. Demographic information in Google Ad Planner comes from 3rd party market research, opt-in and algorithms used for improved demographic estimates. Important to note, currently demographic data in Google AdPlanner is available only in the US.

To sign up vist http://google.com/adplanner