Over the years, Flash-based websites have gotten a bad rap from website visitors, search engine optimizers and web designers who were more concerned with user usability than the aesthetic appeal of a website. In the past, the major problems that faced flash-based websites and their users:

• Flash-based websites, especially those comprised entirely of flash, were a SEOs worst nightmare - search engines couldn’t read flash files so the only on-page optimization that took place was in the domain name itself and within the title element.
• While flash-enabled browsers are the norm today, this wasn’t the case only a few years back. If you had flash-based website, your users would either have to install a plugin to view the flash file or they had to use a different web browser - this is about as user-unfriendly as a website can get.
• Flash-based websites require much more bandwidth than a static HTML website; even though broadband internet is prevalent today - there is still a large chunk of the world’s population relying on 512k internet connections and slower. The internet has given us the opportunity to have information at the push of a button - and many people don’t react favorably to a 30 second long “loading” screen.
• Website visitors generally like to control how links open - flash-based navigation links essentially take away this freedom by removing the “right click” menu and forcing visitors to view links as they’re programmed into the flash file.

Now, these are only a few of the problems that have faced flash-based websites, both in the past and even today. While the overall user-friendliness of flash hasn’t improved significantly over the years - there’s been a recent change in terms of flash and search engine optimization that may very well cause all of us to see a significant spurt in flash-based websites; like it or not - search engines now have the ability to read flash files.

Adobe lends a helping hand to Yahoo and Google

Search engines have been trying unsuccessfully to accurately read the contents of flash-based files for years, and recently Adobe has given Yahoo and Google the software they need to do just that. In essence, this move on Adobe’s part has the potential of opening up the floodgates for flash lovers; a move tantamount to giving web developers a green light to use flash to their hearts content while allowing said website developers to truthfully assert that flash is now “SEO friendly”.

Truth-be-told, this advancement in flash-search technology is for all intents and purposes a positive step forward. Website developers now have a way to integrate Flash into websites without losing the ability to optimize these types of websites for search engines, which really is beneficial as it may help quality websites with useful services to rise up in the SERP.  While we don’t deny that this is a move in the right direction - the effects of this advancement lead us to the most important question of all: will this move forward in flash-based website optimization cause a step back in terms of user-friendliness in the global marketplace? Only time will tell.