Until now, if you designed a website in Flash, you were out of luck in terms of SEO. Search engines in fact could not read Flash and this means that even a rich, very targeted site would not come up in search engine results.
You can see that searching is inacurate as many great sites are Flash only.
This is scheduled to change in the future as Adobe has said they will start working with leading search engine companies such as Yahoo and Google to make the SWF Flash file format readable.
Many in the industry think this is a big deal and I tend to agree.
One of the areas where this move can be most important is in reduced duplication of effort. Many sites which develop in Flash also develop a seperate but equivalent HTML site for SEO reasons. Obviously this is duplicated effort and makes no sense in the long term. Now, companies can comfortably develop Flash-only sites without the need for site duplication.
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rey
August 20, 2009 at 10:46 pmIt is good to know. That was one reason, we didn’t use flash in our web site beside the fact that we didn’t know how.
Noureen
August 31, 2009 at 7:22 amIs sure is good to know. I have no idea how these thing works. But is good to know that flash was not getting read by Search engines.
Joshan
September 11, 2009 at 11:03 pmThat is good to know. We are going to use Flash for our web site, and not hurting is ranking would be great.
Ben
October 10, 2009 at 1:47 pmThings are not improving with Adobe, but they may at very slow rate. We have had 64 bit Operating systems for past 4 years, and Adobe have not had any support for 64 bit OS. Why you ask? I think is because they need to change to whole application (Flash) to get it working with 64 bit (very time consuming). So many of our customers are complaning that why they can’t see any documents (Pictures and Videos) in their 64 bit Vista or 64 Bit XP Operating systems, and when we tell them is up to Adobe to provide that support, they do send words of regards to Adobe in many different languages. I Also need to say, to make Adobe falsh work in 64 Bit, you need to change your Browser to 32 bit, then things work since they have support for 32 bit.
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