You’ll probably have heard the news that Google can now index the textual content in Flash files. This is good news, but it is far from the full story. I posted about it over on our blog, but figure the folks here might be interested. Hope you don’t mind the cross link:

The news broke last week, but honestly it feels like more of a PR exercise for Adobe than any real break though in the search friendliness of Flash. Our recommendation is still to use Flash only for rich media, and leave content and navigation to HTML, which will always do a better job...read the rest.

What do you think?

I agree I would still not go all the way with a flash site, at least leave the content and navigation in HTML with just a touch of flash being used for design purposes only.

It is nice to know that Adobe are working on the SEO friendliness of Flash files though, sounds like they are still a while away from making it completely SEO friendly however.

What do think the future of the www will look like when flash is more SEO friendly, do you think it would be more widely used than today or just the same as today? IMO I would not use it anymore than I already do in my sites as I prefer to stick with PHP etc.. as it is more powerful than flash.

Though I could see a growth in Flash development as in the future when a customer asks for a flash site I could not say that I do not recommend it because it is not SEO friendly.