Flash SEO - flash is now searchable

Published by neil under internet on July 1, 2008

Quoting some SEO’s and bloggers…

“If you’re not in google, you do not exist…”

Sounds harsh, but it is true. Most SEO experts would say that “Flash is Evil” because it doesn’t bring your site to the results of search engines. Until now.

Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch writes:

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project).

So there you have it. If you’re a web designer and you’re into flash sites, you can now be indexed and searched.Now, just think about the design and time you have to put in.