Yeah yeah, we have all read the blogs. The question I was approached with by hordes of developers, product managers, and marketers was, "Hey, can we finally officially ignore your SEO guideline and make more shiny Flash?“ My answer is still the same: "Not now, wait a few years.“

The developers, product mangers, and marketers haven’t read the Google blogs, they have read some newspaper stories. Sadly ,95% of all newspaper articles got the facts not quite right. The development is about quantity, not quality. Yes, Flash is now better crawlable, indexable, and maybe searchable - but still not findable in a conversion triggering way.

Here is the outline:

Static text in flash file was indexable by Google for quite some time.

Now due to some new mumbo jumbo technology, not only static text but "dynamic text“ generated later in the flash application is also indexable. This means more text from flash will actually be in Google's index.

But: due to the fact that

• text in flash is unstructured
• and cannot be pointed to directly (i.e., you can’t directly link to your flash animation, there just is no URL)

the ranking will –for now- not be much improved.

Currently only the quantity of textual content from flash in Google's index will rise. The quality rankings of such content must yet to be seen (currently there is no indication that there is any change--the Google press releases were solely about crawling and indexing).

Additionally, most flash pages are

• an application (PHP, .aspx, ….)
• which renders HTML
• which includes a JavaScript
• which places a Flash file on top

And in most cases we want the users to reach the HTML page and not the flash files directly.

http://www.google.com/search?q=+SEO+filetype%3Aswf  

(We don’t want the users there, yet gladly such results seldom rank visible. )

So yes, the development form Adobe & Google is a big step and in a few years there will be no need to differ between HTML and FLASH. But until then it is majorly important that we optimize our HTML rendering framework and HTML content (and the HTML beneath the Flash), and for FLASH to deliver a great interactive experience.