With the surprise news that Adobe hooked Google and Yahoo up with a special reader for the spiders (which allows the engines to parse the .swf files and index/follow deeper content), does that mean the SEO’s PE special weapon can be abandoned?
I’m still going to stick with it for a while for my SEO blog and my clients’ sites. Google is adopting the reader first, and has technically been lightly reading some flash files already, but anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows that a lot of these properties launch with half-powered products all the time. Their track record isn’t stellar, so why not a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach? I don’t think I would consider dropping PE until at least a few more months after MSN jumps aboard. I’m not sure I would cease building products for the PE method (depending on the cost vs. value), and simple on-page coding is so easy - it seems like a no-brainer.
What about the other engines that will never be this advanced? Do you care about them? In preperation for vertical and social searching, I think it’s wise to consider what they could become. I think this news is going to spark a huge influx of flash sites, but I’m thinking this still seems like a bad idea.
