Macromedia Focus Group to make an SEO version of Flash

[J_Paul]

I was reading an article today that grabbed my attention. Below is an excerpt:


Toronto Search Engine Strategies Report: Back To Basics

There was one MAJOR announcement made at SES Toronto. Last paragraph I mentioned that most spiders can not deal with FLASH based sites. At yesterday's Design for Search Engines seminar, Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative announced that Macromedia has created an internal focus group dedicated to creating an SEO friendly version of FLASH. While this does not necessarily mean a new version of FLASH will be forthcoming, Macromedia gets quite concerned when webmasters and SEOs avoid FLASH as it is not search engine friendly. Gregory's announcement was confirmed by SingingFish GM Karen Howe who is also working with Macromedia to solve the SEO unfriendly aspects of FLASH.

Read the rest of this article
http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/seo/wpn-4-20040513TorontoSearchEngineStrategiesReportBackToB asics.html

What do you all think about this??

[Markll]

Also noteworthy on the subject is the fact that search engines (Google in particular) are beginning to read and index Flash swfs.

http://flashseo.com

[daxesh]

Crawling of flash is still at an initial stage.

[colr]

Seems all very strange to me, I've had flash elements indexed for some time:

http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:iwanthits&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=30&sa=N&filter=0

I can understand that perhaps the swf makeup can affect SEO performace - for example, the flash file I see here obviously contains text elements embedded within.

I do think that the boys at Macromedia will have their work cut out for them to improve the situation.