SEO in the World of Web 2.0

Flash Not Friendly

Google’s view on Flash is that it doesn’t provide a user-friendly experience. Flash is wholly inaccessible to the vision-impaired, unrenderable on devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, and can’t be accessed without broadband connectivity.

In particular, Google frowns on navigational elements presented exclusively in Flash. Given this stance, Google isn’t likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, it’s in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as “progressive enhancement,” whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.