Adobe Flash is Open: The Beginning of SEO for Flash?

The revolutionary software creator Adobe Systems Inc. has teased SEO consultants across the web by announcing the opening of Flash. But, it is simply another effort to popularize its Flash player through the Open Screen Project. The Open Screen Project will allow flash developers to publish content and applications on desktop and mobile gadgets. Adobe did not mention anything about including solutions to cause web content available for search engines. This project will just give further support to Flash industry architects, open access to its licenses and related code details, as well as pulling elsewhere all restrictions related to the application"s use. Although I comply with a statement from Adobe's CEO, "Adobe Flash Player is the world"s most pervasive client runtime, " owing to of its creative options, as an SEO consultant I have to assert that Flash should only be used to enhance the user knowledge in very specific areas of a website. Flash-based websites are
just invisible to search engines. From a usability standpoint, we always discourage our clients from all the more featuring a 15 second splash video on their websites; most of the age users do not watch them. Adobe Flash hides your rich content from search engines, and they usually have difficulties following links. Until Adobe announces an SEO-friendly Flash version, that is to say, a Flash model that allows search engines to discover and follow links from content and menus --- making it organically crawl-able for search engines, I do not think that any search engine optimization consultant nor interactive marketing agency will recommend the employ of Flash. For companies that "must" have Flash versions of their websites, they should be simply that; Flash versions. The main version and landing pages of their websites should always be HTML based. You can always provide users with a link to the Flash version. Just build certain you hide these from crawlers (define) in
the robots folder (define). And as we always assign forward, try to measure this with web analytics to support your experiment. You will be amazed about your findings. Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/search-engine-optimization/news_2008-05-24-22-00-04-261.html