I have to admit. I am not the biggest fan of optimizing Flash websites. There are tons of blog posts which have written extensively how to SEO Flash. We all know the reasons: The search engines don’t know how to crawl these kind of sites, they eat up too much bandwidth, they have a slow load time, they’re CPU heavy etc.

From today there will be less headaches for SEOs and more love for Flash – supposedly. Google and Yahoo announced that they will be able to crawl Flash websites – thanks to Adobe. Apparently the software company has created a special Flash player which will aid the search engine in crawling the web content.

The Google webmaster blog has a great Q&A regarding the improvements. A quick summary:

• Better indexing of textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
• All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. The words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
• Images (and text in images) will not be recognized and indexed.
• Flash content on website will be automatically indexed. If webmaster prefer Google to ignore their less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, they should consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to the search engines.
• Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript.
• Google currently does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by Flash files of a website.
• Currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages.

Mmmm. Interesting. How was the reaction of the blogosphere? Huge. According to Trendpedia there were around 7000 posts published about this topic within the last 24 hours. The chart looks quite impressive:

There have been quite a lot of doubts and critical voices out there in the blogosphere about this news.

Mathew Ingram writes in his great blog post titled “News Flash: Flash Websites Still Suck”:

I also have to wonder whether the ability to search through Flash files is going to be that great for websites, since the main thing that gets you higher in Google search results is the number (and quality) of links that you have to your content. (…) But the biggest fly in the ointment for me is the simple fact that most Flash websites are — not to put too fine a point on it — crap.

Techcrunch weighs in:

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim adds:

Google just destroyed the web. (…) Until (the search engine) can demonstrate that its Flash crawling capabilities are equal to its HTML crawling, you risk building a site that, while indexable, is not as “optimized” as its simple HTML cousin.

And Lisa Barone from the Bruce Clay Blog doesn’t spare with criticism:

Flash Web sites are evil. (…) They’re a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. (…) My SEO advice: Stick with creating HTML-based Web sites that users will want to interact with.

What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization Professsionals?

Search Engine Land has a great summary:

Can SEOs now remove the “review Flash implementation” line from their checklists? Probably not. However, it should be easier for SEOs to work with Flash-based sites going forward. SEOs should keep in mind that these new algorithms don’t take into account any meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file and, for now, Google’s cache won’t show a representation of the extracted text so site owners can’t verify what is actually being crawled by viewing the cached copy.

Plus:

If you really HAVE to use Flash – read Jonathan Hochman’s useful article ‘How to SEO Flash’ and SEO Book’s great post ‘How to Flash sites rank well‘, among others. And get the 117 design guidelines for Flash usability by usability guru Jakob Nielson. It costs $60 – but it’s worth it.