Google is Easing the Pain For Flash Websites to Rank Better
If you have ever created a website in Flash you will know that it has been difficult to get in to rank in the search engine results pages. The problem with Flash is that search engines cannot correctly read what is contained in a Flash file. Google has always said it can read the contents of Flash, however has had a hard time understanding what all the information meant.
Google has always been committed to indexing Flash and striving towards their goal of the perfect search. Although we may still be several years from the perfect search, the same cannot be said about Flash. In June of Last year Google placed an article on their webmasters blog describing some of the amazing advancements they have achieved in indexing Flash.
The will be music to ears of Flash developers and website owners alike. Google can now index the text within a flash file and will return it within the snippet information within the search engine results pages. It can also in some cases follow links within the Flash. This is sure to help considerably to get your Flash website ranked better.
I must note that if your using javascript to run your Flash Google may still have problems indexing your Flash files. See this snippet from the article: “Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”
In my option Flash should be used sparingly and a whole website should not be built using Flash, however I do understand that certain multimedia website do it this way. Also there is no substitute for a plain old HTML page.
What we can take from this is that Google is investing a lot of time and money into this and their indexing of Flash will only improve in the future. The problem is when Flash is totally indexed by the search engines web developers will most likely being using a new system and Google will have to start at the beginning again with this new technology, unless of course the new emerging technologies are SEO friendly.
By Michael Hanna
For help with advanced search engine optimisation in Flash I would recommend visiting MOU. They have many years experience in helping your website design rank good in the search engines.