To Flash or not to Flash

June 11, 2009
Rob Ackerman

There have been many articles written suggesting that using Flash on your site is a big SEO no-no, as spiders cannot read Flash. At the times of those articles that may have been true, but now that is not exactly the case. In June 2008 Adobe release the SWF searchability FAQ tating that they are working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash content searchable. Also in June 2008 Google announced Improved Flash indexingstating that they can search text and extract links from Flash files.

Does this mean I can use Flash everywhere now?

While Google has announced that they can index Flash, there are still a couple hiccups that they are working on. Yahoo is working on it, but has not provided update on where they stand. Also, there has been no word from Microsoft yet. Given the uncertainty, it still might not be a good idea to use Flash everywhere on your site. As seen in the following chart, Google still has the greatest share of search traffic, but 37% of search is done through other search engines. If you dont want to put all your eggs in one SEO basket, I'd recommend you try and use more SEO friendly techniques.

Nielsen Online Search Engine Share

What else does this mean?

Some people may have stuffed large navigational menus into Flash (as to not to have too many links on a page) or to put content in Flash as not not dilute the content of some pages. This was a technique people used because they knew Search Engines couldn't see the content. This technique will no longer work with Google, so you may need to redesign some of those menus.