For quite some time, it's been a well accepted tennet of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that Flash websites perform poorly in the search engines and should be avoided. The reasoning went like this: the search engine spiders that crawl our web pages to "figure out what they're about" can not read Flash code (typically contained in .swf files). So, when a search engine crawls a Flash website it looks empty. That means you have to rely almost exclusively on "off-site SEO" (i.e. backlinks from external sites with keyword appropriate anchor text) to inform the search engines what your site is about. Enough backlinks can compensate for the invisible Flash code, but this is often not a cost effective proposition for businesses that need to drive traffic to their websites through organic search.

This all may have started to change.

Jeb just forwarded me this story from PCmag.com where Adobe announces it has developed technology to allow search engines to read and index Flash code. They've given this technology to Google and Yahoo! and, according to Adobe, Google's already been using it with Yahoo! to follow soon.

Details on how this technology works are still murky. It's not clear what parts of the flash code the search engines will be able to read, let alone which elements will be given more weight over others. Flash developers currently don't have any tools to optimize their code for search engines but Adobe has announced that they are working on them.

Until things become clearer we still recommend against developing a site entirely in Flash (unless you don't care about organic search traffic). Flash has a place on a website, but in our opinoin only when used as an element on an HTML coded page. You could roll the dice and hope that Google correctly understands your website's Flash code, but that's probably a chance your business doesn't want to take.

In the meantime we'll be keeping an eye on how this develops. The day is probably not too distant when a Flash website can perform as well as an HTML coded website.

I was surprised to see that Google's already been using this technology because I haven't noticed any Flash pages performing surprisingly well in their search engine. I would love to hear from anyone that's found a Flash webpage performing well in Google.