Macromedia (www.macromedia.com) announced on September 20 that FLASH files (.SWF) can now be read and indexed by search engine spiders. Until now the spiders could not extract data from .SWF files.
The development of the FLASH SDK (www.macromedia.com/software/flash/download/search_engine/) will have a large impact on the design world. A few years ago, when FLASH emerged as a cutting edge design technique, literally millions of websites were designed using that rich, multimedia environment. And while many sites designed using FLASH are highly creative and aesthetically pleasing, traditionally they have not ranked well on search engines.
For years sites designed primarily in FLASH have posed problems for SEOs as search engine spiders were unable to read much of the content presented by FLASH flies, which are frequently used to create the index page of sites. The dilemma for SEOs was that spiders would generally not move past the most important page of the site, the first one. And a spider-friendly index page is extremely important for strong rankings because it usually presents the most useful information for SEOs and is generally considered the primary target for search engine rankings.
