Google Now Crawls Flash!

The folks at Google announced yesterday that their latest algorithm release will now be able to crawl and index text-based content that is inside Flash files. I love their wording… In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. …understatement of the year! So now all the designers will be jumping for joy since they will have a comeback to the old SEO speech they’ve been getting for years. While we’ve always sustained that Flash and SEO efforts can be harmonious, this news certainly takes it to a whole new level. So I hear you asking - “doesn’t this put the SEO’s (YOU Josh!) out of a job?” Not hardly. It basically makes our lives a bit easier in that we can focus our SEO conversations on important stuff like content and links, and perhaps set aside the whole Flash vs. HTML religious war. Hallelujah! However, one important point to remember… At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text. Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements. The old best practices around having well-written, keyword-rich text information on your site still apply folks. Only now the text can sing and dance too!