A Flash of hope

Flash websites were always a 'tough nut to crack' for SEO professionals due to the fact that major search engines could not cache/index them completely. This fact gave many website owners sleepless nights because a website minus flash decreased its customer appeal. Including flash to make a website more attractive resulted in poor search engine rankings. A 'catch 22' situation for webmasters and businesses alike.

A shimmer of hope is glistening over the horizon for webmasters who always wanted their flash websites to be cached and indexed in totality. A press release made by Adobe on 1^st of July 2008 reads “Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

The development would have a significant impact on the SEO industry and is being hailed as the next giant leap towards an optimized world.