Well, it’s here! And all the website owners we kept warning about the need to have text added to their sites are thumbing their noses at the idea that you still need text rich sites to rank well on Google.
As eagerly anticipated, and long expected, Google has teamed with Adobe and Yahoo to come up with the technology necessary to crawl and index flash sites.
This doesn’t mean all is well in Flash land, however. Make sure you read the fine print! Still inaccessible are FLV video files, and most images and text imbedded in images. The main thing that is now accessible is text that hitherto could not be, but is now able to be indexed by means of a new algorithm.
The algorithm particulars are of course top secret, but the idea is that the search engine explores Flash files the same way a human searcher could, by clicking on buttons and going through the content manually. The text on each page is memorized and this allows for a through indexing of the site- insofar as it goes.
Basically, the Googlebot can crawl, extract and index any text and links in the flash files. Not such a very big step forward, then; a lot of webmasters were hoping for pure image indexing!
That still seems quite a way off in the future, so don’t expect to be able to get away with pure Flash format anytime soon! You still need to be able to make your whole site crawler friendly, and this means text, text, text. Hyperlinks, meta tags, content – as much as you can get in – otherwise Google will dismiss you like an impressionist painting.
Don’t get me wrong. Flash is nice, videos are great, images are proven to help sales and keep consumer interest. You just can’t depend on pure Flash to keep your site up and running if you are going to be depending heavily on traffic from one of the major search engines.
Just make sure your site is indexed by having at least as much crawlable textual content as you do Flash based or image content. This should ensure that your site is not ignored or underestimated when it comes to ranking.
The rules haven’t really changed all that much. Webmasters with a fondness for Flash content may have a little more incentive to keep on including it, but beware of relying too heavily on image based content until we see how much a difference this tweak to Google’s capacity really makes.