In June 2008, Google blog said that very soon their system will be able to extract text from the flash websites and after that they started working with Adobe on this and tried to find a solution where flash designers may not have to change their way of working also and there should be a win win situation. Earlier Google used to get no text from the flash websites but after some time there were claims that there has been drastic improvements.

Have there been drastic improvements?

Adobe, about the same time in mid-2008 spoke of “dramatic improvements” for search results and increasingly relevant listings for millions of  Rich Internet Applications. By now, neither Adobe nor Google have published precise numbers – about how many more pages are being crawled and how this has affected search results.

Adobe continues to assure developers that they can be confident that their page will be found by users everywhere. This is not quite the case, particularly when Flash pages have little textual content. The vast majority of Flash content is not composed primarily of words, it is built with video, images and animation, and no details about any of those will find their way into search results with this new approach. Google’s new Flash algorithms still extract only text and links, leaving everything else looking like the same old black box.

The “U” factor in the URL

Associating a unique URL with all unique content is the way to go. The search process is much better served this way, with Flash implementations dynamically loading text throughout the user interaction as the URL stays the same. Google can now track and remember those interactions, in a limited fashion, and when the URL is maintained then everything dynamically loaded through the user interactions will be tied to that single URL.

In simpler words, when a content that is dynamically loaded into Flash from, say, the third user interaction matches a search query, that Flash application is presented in the results. However, when the user clicks on that result in Google, the content is not found on the page. Instead, the user who is searching for that content, has to continue interacting with the Flash application until the “third” interaction content gets loaded. This might cause a frustration and prompt some users to move on. Flash developers and site designers should work around this by creating distinct URLs for all content. This also helps the site be more “viral,” also.

What this means for SEO professionals?

Flash has always been a source of frustration for SEO professionals, while some think that text should always be HTML, and Flash be limited to non-text content, like videos, animations, motion graphics and illustrations. Others believe the other way. Who’s right? Work continues on this important matter, but it is no longer controversial to say that it is getting easier all the time for SEO professionals to work with Flash-based sites – and it will be increasingly faster and better going forward.