If you have been focusing on SEO for quite some time now, you would know that most experts emphasize the need to work on your HTML content rather than Flash content. This is because Google and other search engines are unable to index content of the former kind. Well, that is until now.
I found an interesting article on dBusinessNews which talks about this specific issue:
Google announced recently that they have been working with Adobe to improve upon the indexing of Adobe’s Flash technology. Google now has the ability to index flash components and self-contained flash sites. Google can gather all kinds of information from flash files.
“All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.”
- Google Webmaster Central Blog
This is definitely good news to people who want to have more “flash” in their web sites. Though HTML is good enough for content and basic formatting, Flash allows for additional interactivity and visual effects. It is about time that Google actually makes use of the content coded in Flash for searching as well.
The question remains for some people though – is it still better to use HTML for SEO purposes? What do you think?
2 Comments to "Google Indexes Flash Web Sites"
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I would think that html is going to always be simpler and more concise for the bots to analyze, but this is good info. On a side note, as a user, I really don’t like flash, I often immediately navigate away from flash sites
Does this fall into the same category as Java? Sorry I’m like a total noob.