Google indexing flash, what will this mean for accessibility?

Google are indexing flash, the news most designers have been waiting for! Flash has always been a harder sell for the pure designer types who build flash heavy websites and do not take the search engine spiders into account.

How will flash based sites rank within search engines in comparision to semantically optimised websites? With any luck the semantically optimised websites will still take precedence over flash sites as they adhere to best practice coding which takes accessibility and all types of users and browsers in to account.

The inclusion of flash content in Google’s index will also mean that another can of spam worms will get opened as the black hats out there will look at new ways to manipulate flash for better rankings.

Realistically I think flash heavy sites do not cater for universal accessibility and they should sit below websites in the SERP’s which do so. Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset a semantic search engine is further indication that search engines are starting to pay more attention to semantically optimised websites.

We hope search engines still stay more favorable towards websites who use W3C technologies and semantic coding as opposed to non-W3C formats.