SEO Gets Flushed - Google Gets Flashed

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 2 of July , 2008 at 7:51 am

We have written many articles that either allude to, or come right out and say that your web design should avoid flash scripts wherever possible. It simply wasn’t good for search engine optimization. We have also written on several occasions about how quickly things can change when it comes to search engines and optimizing your pages.

Google have gone and done it again. Changed all the rules, and this time not for the better. Call me old fashioned, however there is nothing like a good clean HTML structure to your web pages. They are easy to edit and easy to modify when it comes to search engine optimization.

Andy Beal has reported on Google’s latest announcement relating to their ability to now spider Flash files and index the text content found. This includes any links but at this time not graphics or images.

Thanks to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, Google has announced a new indexing algorithm that is able to crawl and index the content of Flash files.

Andy seems to agree that this is not necessarily a step in the right direction by Google. Andy makes three very good points in his summary:

1. Until Google can demonstrate that its Flash crawling capabilities are equal to its HTML crawling, you risk building a site that, while indexable, is not as “optimized” as its simple HTML cousin.
2. If your Flash site is nothing but cool imagery and little else, you still won’t rank for much.
3. If you build Flash web sites just because you have the skilz–and not because it’s a better user-experience–I will not rest until I hunt you down!

As for the other search engines, there is no word on whether or not they will follow suit. You can be sure that somewhere along the way they will join the party. As for search engine optimization strategies, it is back to the drawing board.

Anyone who is using Flash in their web pages will need to ensure that the content that can be read is accurate, that links are not dead, and that keywords use is optimized. Search engine optimization surely is a never ending game.

Category: SEO, Search Engines

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