So, if you head over to Techmeme right now, you will see a lot of discussion about Google announcing their abiility to index flash. In that article they mention:
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
which was actually something that I talked about in my post the other day about one reason to avoid flash based sites.
Lots of people are discussing whether this is good or bad for the internet or whether it even works or is new at all.
I’m obviously not a flash guru nor am I really a search engine guru but the announcement did make me wonder. If Google is able to start reading and indexing flash content, will Google have to start encouraging web developers to nofollow the flash ads that are popping up on the web advertising companies such as DoubleClick which was recently purchased by Google? After all, Google really cracked down hard on text link ads that didn’t have a nofollow because their spiders would crawl those links and corrupt the search results.
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Well since Links inside Flash themselves have up till now had little or no weight they have in effect beened in the same way javascript links are. That said if Google is going to start placing weight on certain actionscript links (remember Flash doesn’t have a native link structure as we think of it) then it might be opening itself up for some interesting times…
It should make for some interesting new techniques that people will try.
yea this is good news… i didnt think they would ever get around to doing this :O
-Jake