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Google Can Now Index Dynamic Flash Content
The traditional argument for not using Flash to build a site is that it's not SEO friendly. In the past Flash was viewed by Google and other search engines as an impenetrable "box" on your web page. Any text or meta data contained within the box was invisible to search engines, which led to developers employing all manor of clandestine and questionable SEO tactics like "Cloaking" etc. to overcome this.
Over the past few years Google has begun indexing flash, but only static content. This means any text or data which is embedded directly in the movie could be indexed, but only in the parent SWF and not in externally loaded SWF. This was a good step forward, but what it meant in reality was that it was only really small businesses with limited brochure sites or personal websites that could take advantage of this. Any serious site built using Flash could only be done using multiple SWF with dynamic content brought in using XML or a similar mechanism.
Not any more... as of mid June 2009 Google has begun indexing dynamic and external Flash content Google Webmaster Central. This is really going to shake up front end development as we know it. Suddenly there are a lot more options. Flash is a really simple and often low bandwidth way of creating some really feature rich and exciting applications. It also doesn't share, to the same extent, the cross browsers rendering issues that it's CSS and JavaScript counterparts do.
Expect to see a lot more serious Flash applications on the Internet over the next year... all we're waiting for now is for the iPhone to support Flash.
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