Google can now read Flash?
Good news for all web developers who create sites in Flash as Google (and Yahoo eventually, but probably not Microsoft) are working with Adobe to make indexing Flash sites nicer and more possible.
Now, this is early days and I wouldn’t get your “how to produce “flash” Flash websites” (not a real book just yet…) any time soon, but for all you devoted Flash developers, this may start to get you out of jail when you clients ask “no one can find me”.
Google would really like to index the whole web if it could and Flash (and JavaScript) are the biggest banes of it life in this respect. Also, because of the heavy incoming link structure for some Flash sites/sections, they do indeed end up indexing some of them relatively highly, but usually with the fantastically descriptive listing of something like…
[FLASH] Loading… Play Video Play Video Replay Copy to clipboard URL …File Format: Shockwave Flash
Loading… Play Video Play Video Replay Copy to clipboard URL: 0ß0å0ü0È MUTE 0ß0å0ü0È MUTE.
www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf – Similar pages
As you can image, Google has never been a fan of this as it messes up the relevance for the searcher from the results pages.
So what progress have they made so far? Well if you do a search for Flash SWF files in Google (click here to try) you still don’t really get a great experience as a searcher. I think the time when parity come between text based sites and Flash based sites from an indexing perspective will be a long time coming (if ever).
So, my cut on this for the short and medium term is make sure you still only use Flash as a part of your site (nice fading images, animation, etc.) and not the whole thing. If you do, then don’t expect to be top of the rankings any time soon. This initiative will help, but it is not a green light to carry on regardless.
Now I may move on to “Flash and accessibilty”… maybe not…
