Flash is Evil! Well, maybe a little bit less these days…

The idea of using Flash to develop a website has traditionally appalled all but the very deadicated Flash developers and having was always a very big obstacle to getting any kind of decent rankings in the search engine. This is all about to change - maybe!

Today Adobe announced that they are working with Google and Yahoo to improve the crawlability of Flash based websites. With the improved crawling of these website should in turn improve the rankings and deliver more traffic.

So, what is the Google webmaster blog saying about this? They have detailed the exact capabilities of this improved search technology in a brief overview from two of their software engineers on their indexing team.

They bascially say that;

• they can now index textual content embedded in .swf files
• they can now index urls in the flash file
• they can’t index any text contained in images within the flash swf
• if you use javascript to load a flash file you still run the risk of your flash file not getting indexed
• there are a couple of language restrictions still, Hebrew and Arabic

Important to note that Microsoft gets no mention in the Abode news release, they are obvioulsy still relying on their Silverlight technology.

The question still remains though can flash based websites get good visibility. If you consider that large amounts of text based content are a key factor in getting good rankings, most flash websites, even when they have their text indexed just won’t have the same impact as traditional html websites.

One final thought on this, if I come across a website when I’m searching for something and its built using flash, what happens when I final some interesting content and want to link to it? How do website built using flash benefit from backlinks to good content. Sure you can link to the website, but you really want to link to the content you want to reference.

What do you think, do you feel we’re about to see some growth in flash websites? Is flash no longer evil?