Google’s stance on Flash
Posted by raesea2 on July 17, 2007
Ran across a good blog post from google on how they view flash. Interesting stuff in there. I think the decision to use flash and how much to use it really depends on what your industry is and your goals for your webiste. If you are going to rely completely on organic searches then obviously doing a website completely in flash is not your answer.
As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.
