Search Engines Play Nicely with Flash. Finally?

It’s nice to see that Adobe has finally given the keys for Google and Yahoo to index SWF files. It’s 2008 and this has been a long, long, long time coming.

One would probably ask, “why now?” and there would be a variety of answers but a few come into mind. SEO is increasingly a big business and the obvious benefits of practicality would immensely benefit everyone. But, the rise of Safari and a new generation of Web 2.0 apps that had Flash like features without the use of Flash must have spooked Adobe and ramped up development. 

The increasing rise of Web 2.0 websites devoted to app-ware is only the beginning of the developmental shift that increasingly relies on HTML/CSS and less on the buggeries of Flash development. While Flash will undoubtedly have it’s place, the era of a large nested Flash site is essentially over. This new ability at search engine crawling will not change the fact that nested Flash sites are (mostly) dead.