By now, everyone has visited a website that utilizes Flash multimedia within its design. Since 1996, the use of Flash has grown in popularity thanks to its ability to add animation and interactivity to websites. More recently, Flash has become an essential component in the prolific distribution of intrusive “pop-ups,” or web-based advertisements. Flash also grants designers the ability to integrate video into web pages, and this has led many within the Web 2.0 space to use Flash to develop rich Internet applications. Many companies, including my own, Denver interactive agency Fusionbox, offer streaming Flash Video Solutions to clients in need of online video.

While the inclusion of Flash into websites no doubt enriches the user experience rendering it that much “flashier,” search engine optimizers (SEOs) have long been wary of the use of Flash due to the fact that it’s supposedly unindexable by the search engines. Key word here: supposedly.

As we all know, the search engine game changes daily. If it stayed the same, it wouldn’t be called a game. The inherent beauty of it is that no one knows everything. Instead, we’re all just players who know something, and we’re all moving forward as we try to learn more, keeping up with developments happening in our space. One such development is the evolution of Flash and the impact it has had on the science of search.

Back in the day, Flash files were not indexable by search engines because the content was hidden from the spider’s digital “eyes.” The implications of this fact were dire from an SEO standpoint. It was no secret. Invisible content did not boost search engine rank or positioning. If anything, it held quality sites back because Google was blind to content found within Flash files, mistakenly convinced that there was no content at all.

Still, many web designers stuck to Flash (despite our SEO driven pleas) after falling in love with the allure of its interactivity and the attractive design capabilities it offered.

In those days, designers were confronted with a difficult choice. Give up on Flash in order to achieve better search engine rankings, or preserve the design and watch site rankings stagnate or plummet. Flash then, became a visually beautiful application that was literally empty beneath the surface, until now that is.

Today, Flash has changed dramatically from what it once was. The choice that once plagued designers is now extinct. Macromedia, the company responsible for creating Flash, now offers a product known as the Flash Search Engine SDK (Software Development Kit) that includes an application known as “swf2html.” This application extracts both links and text from Flash files (.swf), returning the data in HTML form. This allows Google and other search engines to “see” Flash content that was formerly invisible.

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