One of our major issues with Adobe’s Flash, and one of the main reasons we use it sparingly and rarely recommend it to our clients, is that it struggles to be understood by Google and other search engines. This situation has now changed with an initiative by Adobe: they have released code that makes it easier for search engines to read Flash content. This goes some way of removing our concerns. 

A key problem remains though: it is still extremely hard to create ‘deep links’ into the content. For example, if this journal post was instead text inside a Flash file, Google would not be able to link to it directly. Therefore even if the text was found, Google would send you to the ‘start’ of the Flash file, forcing the user to then hunt for it. This would be annoying not only for the user, but for us as well. The key way that Google ranks content is to measure the amount of links to it, but as websites can still not link directly to it, Flash remains problematic.

By Andrew Fox on Tuesday, 1st July, 2008 at 9:12 am