You’ve probably seen at least one of the recent articles how Flash websites and SEO are no longer mutually exclusive; however, Flash elements aren’t exactly search engine optimization friendly all of a sudden either.  The real changes that Adobe’s recent announcement about how they are teaming up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash sites able to be indexed by search engines are somewhere in between.

Google claims that they have created an algorithm that can crawl through Flash much like a user would - clicking on the various items and manually discovering the content.  Now, the search engine is capable of indexing SWF files like buttons, gadgets, menus, and entire self-contained Flash websites.  In addition, Google will index all the content that users can see as they interact with the Flash - including links.  However, images will remain un-indexed, as well as FLV files (for instance, the video clips on YouTube).

Fortunately for SEOs and web designers everywhere, Google will automatically begin to index Flash content as their spiders continue to crawl the web, with a few limitations.  One more point of contention between the search engine optimizers and the creative types is gone.