Now google can read flash content much better

So far I have hated flash simply because its not SE friendly. Now Google says that it can read flash files and they have started indexing it. It can be the mother of all developments recently in SEO field.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

Here is a closer examination of what they can read and index:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

Yeah this could really impact certain industries a lot, assuming that it's a retroactive change on adobe's part, which from my understanding it is and content in existing flash files is now crawlable.

From what I have heard, adobe has developed a special flash player fro Google which can help extract text contents from a flash file.

This is a very significant development although not a very surprising one. It just had to happen sooner or later.

But now that we know flash is becoming more SE friendly, I think a lot of people are going to start switching to more "flashy" content from just text. But for the annoying loading times, I'd say Flash could very well become tomorrow's industry standard for content. Maybe 10 years down the road, we'd have flash article directories where you can submit your flash articles?

There are still a lot of drawbacks to using flash even with this announcement.

Not least that if you kick your flash file off with Javascript then Google still isn't going to be able to see it.

I think we are still a long way off from flash content being as well understood by Googlebot as HTML content is.