I’ve talked about the Future of Flash in the past, and well, technically now that the future is here I thought we should discuss it again.
First of all, I still stand by my original thoughts about Flash and SEO, however, Google has recently made some interesting improvements. One problem flash developers were facing was that Google would index any external content linked in the flash files as a separate entity. That’s if Google would index the external content at all. But now Google has added “external resource loading”.
This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
So What’s The Current State of SEO and Flash?
Although most SEOs would argue to stay away from flash because of it’s inability to index the content properly, I would argue that it almost doesn’t matter anymore. SEOmoz said something that caught my ear in their “New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data“. They basically implied that header tags have less weight associated with them than they did in the past. It almost seems as if Google is paying less attention to the HTML markup and more attention to incoming links and conversations around the content.
So if your flash is getting indexed and you have a quality content with relevant incoming links, you should not have any problems with Flash being indexed and ranked properly in the search engines.
Now before you go and rip my head off I should state a few obvious problem that still exist:
- There are still accessibility issues (portable devices) when using flash elements however a good flash developer should know their way around them.
- HTML still provides a better format to organize your content for more efficient indexing
The main takeaways here should be that people should not be afraid to at least experiment with flash. It no longer has the indexing issues it used to have. Also, Google still supports the use of SWFObject which takes care of a lot of the indexing problems flash still has.
- Photo by Mazintosh << de nuevo en Granada >>
