This all may have started to change.
Jeb just forwarded me this story from PCmag.com where Adobe announces it has developed technology to allow search engines to read and index Flash code. They’ve given this technology to Google and Yahoo! and, according to Adobe, Google’s already been using it with Yahoo! to follow soon.
Details on how this technology works are still murky. It’s not clear what parts of the flash code the search engines will be able to read, let alone which elements will be given more weight over others. Flash developers currently don’t have any tools to optimize their code for search engines but Adobe has announced that they are working on them.
Until things become clearer we still recommend against developing a site entirely in Flash (unless you don’t care about organic search traffic). Flash has a place on a website, but in our opinoin only when used as an element on an HTML coded page. You could roll the dice and hope that Google correctly understands your website’s Flash code, but that’s probably a chance your business doesn’t want to take.
In the meantime we’ll be keeping an eye on how this develops. The day is probably not too distant when a Flash website can perform as well as an HTML coded website.
I was surprised to see that Google’s already been using this technology because I haven’t noticed any Flash pages performing surprisingly well in their search engine. I would love to hear from anyone that’s found a Flash webpage performing well in Google.
Google makes the announcement official themselves in this post at the Official Google Blog.
If you’re interested in finding out what Google is and isn’t able to read in the Flash code, you should check out this post at the Google Webmaster Blog.
this is really good news
now i can also use flash content on my blog
forget crawling flash sites, when is google going to take over the world? oh, i forgot.. google earth.. now let’s see a google space, and then i’m sold.
Great news! Can always count on Small Box to bring these important updates to our attention. Keep up the good work!
I don’t mean to be a naysayer but they have been talking about this for 7 or 8 years. Let’s see it in the wild and evaluate it’s success.
This is very much in the same category as Chinese Democracy as far as I am concerned.
FYI Kevin, there is a Google Sky
google.com/sky