Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites
As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only website is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.
Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites
Score one for Flash. Will this cause Flash adoption to ramp up on major websites, or will it still lag behind HTML’s ease-of-development?
As we all know, one of the biggest arguments for Flash is that it looks the same and performs (relatively) the same in all browsers. “Searchability” was a huge minus; you’d almost inevitably need to create another HTML-based site to stay in the search engines. With that solved, Adobe takes another step towards becoming a really ubiquitous platform, although I still think they need to open source their development tools to really, really take over. (Will all this destroy HTML? Nope. HTML still has Flash beat in the learning curve barrier to entry; you still need to be a specialist to build Flash apps, but a generalist can at least dabble in HTML and build a web application.)
Here’s my big question of the day: if Google spiders deep within your Flash movie and finds some sort of content, how does it provide a link to it? Is deeplinking to content going to be a problem, especially when it may discover content that’s not really part of any state you’ve really considered? If there’s a page 5 levels deep in my HTML site, Google can find the page and a URL for it; that is not necessarily true of the same type of content located 5 “views” off the stage in a Flash piece. Looks like we’ll be embedding deep linking information for various program states into more and more of our Flash apps…
