MythBusters: Flash on Google - Is it allowed or not ?

Many webmasters are worried that their Flash-based website may not be indexed by the Googlebot so the page can lose traffic, visitors and money. Well, the folks from Googleplex thought it might be a good idea to explain Flash-related matters to the webmasters in order to clarify and to explain the process of crawling this kind
of pages. First of all, the entire website shouldn't be in Flash. If so, the Googlebot may not be able to read the entire content published on your page, resulting an obvious loss of traffic bundled with lack of visitors.

Then, you should remember that this eye-candy flash can be easily used as an intro on your webpage but only if it links to HTML content published on the website. However, it's hard to say if this kind of pages can be indexed by the Goooglebot as long as the search giant's technology can crawl them but cannot access 100 percent of the information. "Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes," Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team, said.

"Textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can," the Google employee added.

The interesting fact is that Google sees a perfect Flash-based website in YouTube, the popular online video sharing service. As the Google employees said, it's better to have a HTML website but include Flash content such as clips and animations. "In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends," Mark Berghausen quoted some Google employees.