Great future for Flash designers ahead - thanks to Google
Posted on July 2, 2008 by
Roy 
SEO, Web Development 
2 Comments
For a long time, SEO experts are having big fights with web designers. And one of the most common situations is when the designer wants to develop Flash based website and the SEO experts want to have more content in the page to play with search engines.
Perhaps, now, when Google is able to crawl flash based content (thanks to Adobe), the fight should end in one front (though you have lots of issues yet to be solved with your designer) at least. As a SEO, all you need to do is to tell your designer to follow the list provided by Google on Flash design.
Anyways, web designers get ready to create more flash based designs and developers get ready to add more interactivity within the flash content.
There is a reason why I pointed interactivity in the last paragraph. If you read the tips (or FAQ) provided by Google, you would find that, they will be crawling only the texts in a flash file (it is still weak in reading images). As they put it - “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“.
What does it mean?
It is time to be more and more interactive with the target visitors.
HTML or Java has their own limitations. Java is better than HTML to make a site interactive but Java cannot provide you the edge over search engines as the normal HTML.
In the same way, videos or slideshows have there own limitations - you would still need to use texts to optimize a video clip or podcast or slideshow for search engines.
With this latest update in Google’s algorithm, you can somehow overcome all these problems. You can interact more freely with your target audience and guide them as you wish throughout the process. At the same time you can remain a search engine friendly website.
And guess what, Flash designers and visualizers would be in great demand for next couple of years until Google starts reading images.
However, I would like to point out one thing - do not make your Flash file to heavy and do not use Flash unless it is very important. Plain text is still the best option for the information seekers and web is full of them.
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Thats a great news for flash programmers like me.
Thanks for the update :)
Sounds like a good solution, I know many types of websites that will benefit from this change.
Flash websites are awesome, but up until now, haven’t been ideal from an SEO standpoint. With this change, we can expect to see a lot more flash based and interactive websites. Good move Google!