For as long as their has been SEO in conversations there has always been one simple fact: Flash and SEO do not mix. However, a couple month ago Adobe looked to change this by announcing their planned improvements in the indexing of flash files by Google and Yahoo. Obviously any change in how flash files are indexed by search engines would have a serious impact not only on Flash SEO, but Video SEO and site design / development as well. Since that announcement was made I have not seen any significant changes, through my own testing and research, in how flash content is being indexed. In fact I have seen little evidence or talk about Flash SEO since that announcement was made. However, Brian Ussery put together an awesome “2009 Google Flash SEO” post that goes into in-depth analysis of flash indexing through his own testing and case studies. Brian’s blog post is a definite must read for anyone involved in SEO or site design / development.
Here are the case studies he put together:
- Google flash content association with parent URLs
- Google flash file pagerank
- Googlebot #anchor (fragment identifier) URL extraction
- Google flash text translation
Bottom line is that there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to Flash SEO, however things seem to be moving forward (slowly). My recommendation stays the same for now - it is ok to build flash heavy sites but take into consideration the standard SEO best practices – check out my SEO Checklist for guidance. But, keep an eye on this as things can change very quickly.
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I guess that Google will continue improving Flash indexing and that we can expect more changes soon.
You can visit our flash and seo experiment at: http://www.flashnseo.com