October 26, 2008 by James Oliver
Flash often has a fairly bad reputation amongst SEOs. Don’t get me wrong, we love playing with it, it’s pretty and fun and allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff. The thing is though, it doesn’t half mess up your search engine visibility if it’s not done right. For this reason many developers stay away from it. That was the prevailing logic anyway, until earlier in the year when Google decided to ride in on a white steed and save Flash.
In July this year Google and Adobe got together to create a brand new algorithm aimed at indexing the text content in Flash. It worked pretty nicely too. Google is now capable of recognising any and all textual content, in any kind of SWF file and is even able to extract the URLs contained therein.
Whilst it’s much too early to quantify the full effect of these changes, I think it’s safe to say that this new algorithm has forever changed the standard logic for creation of Flash sites. Now that the contents can be indexed properly, construction design and optimisation all have to be rethought to accommodate this new opportunity.
Expect to see your favourite Flash sites changing hugely over the coming months.
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