Google recently announced that it was able to now crawl through Flash Web sites. Hog wash.

Well, not really. I'm sure that they have no problem extracting data, but for someone not in the know about optimized HTML code - there's no way in hell that text stripped from Flash can retain the semantic meaning found within good development and strong coding practices.

So, verdict is in, this news release from Google is very, very slanted and subjective.

Aside from that first point, Flash Web sites are typically composed of one page and, often times, rely on a call to an external Javascript or JScript file. These caveats are still recipes for search engine optimization failure!

Before Flash Web site owner's rejoice, they best still think about getting themselves a nice clean coded XHTML/CSS Web site.

I just started implementing Flash-imitating imagery which takes advantage of Scriptalicious/Prototype and JQuery Javascript Frameworks. I get the same emotional response from viewers as Flash and (yeah, there are fancy effect limitations, but..) all that content is parsed and able to be read by the major search engines. Bonus.

For the orginal write up I did about this news release see: Optimized Web Design Doesn't Mix with Flash.