While Google’s announcement sounds great, there are still significant SEO and more general internet marketing issues that they haven’t addressed:

The Link Value Of Internal Links

Yes, Google will crawl all those links in your Flash animation. But will they give them the same value as links in an HTML page? They’re not saying.

Content Value

Will keywords in Flash files get the same attention? Probably not, because:

• Semantic markup: You can’t designate H1 and H2 headings in a Flash file. So there’s no way to show search engines the structure of your Flash content.
• Paragraph markup: There’s also no tag that I know of in Flash.

Testing SEO And Flash

Google is secretive enough with their regular crawler algorithms, but we can use text-only browsers like Lynx to see how our sites will behave for a spider.

How do we test for SEO? There is not a way to do this yet.

User Experience

Flash still has all the same usability issues. If your home page takes 10-20 seconds to load and then jumps around and moves, you’re going to lose customers no matter how easily they find you.

So I would suggest: Use Flash With Caution.

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