Until now websites created from Flash (Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and, more recently, to develop rich internet websites). It was invisible to all search engine spiders. This meant that a beautifully created flash website could not be indexed beyond and meta information or simple text included on the website.

Today Google and Yahoo announced that in partnership with Adobe they have the ability to index flash. This should come as a huge relief to high end web designers and site owners who have spent big bucks on beautiful flash websites. This technology has long been suppressed by the SEO (search engine optimization) community, because of this indexing problem.

According to Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins:

Google can now:

Index text content within Flash

1) This Flash text can be used for the snippet that appears beneath your link in Google search results.

2) Flash text will be used to compare with keywords used in Google searches.

3) Index able Flash content includes text within Flash buttons and menus.

Index links with Flash

1) Links within Flash files can be followed by Google’s web crawler.

Google cannot index non-textual Flash content

1) Google can’t index images within Flash files.

2) Google can’t index text that appears in Flash-based images.

3) Google will not generate anchor text for non-text, Flash-based links.

Google is referring to this as the “Flash indexing algorithm” which is long overdue considering that flash has been around since 1996, and 12 years is not really the anticipated call to action that one would expect from 3 multi-billion dollar companies (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).

The SEO community does not recommend creating websites exclusively created by flash, but using it within your site should be just fine now.