Google To Stop Indexing Flash Based Websites Next Year
Google on Monday announced that it will soon stop indexing Flash content for its search engine, effectively throwing an invisibility cloak over that content.
What is Flash. Flash was introduced in 1996 by Adobe as a way of producing richer content on the web and on computers. It was a very popular web publishing platform in the late 90s but as time went on, fewer and fewer browsers continued to support Flash.
“Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year,” Dong-Hwi Lee, an engineering manager, wrote in a post to the company’s Webmaster Central blog. “In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. [And] Google Search will stop indexing standalone .swf files.”
If you happen to be the owner of a flash based website, you may be forced to upgrade your website to use html 5, css3 and js to be compliant with modernised standards. One can only conclude the possibility that your website may suffer the results of Google’s actions.
Why is this a problem?
If your site is not being indexed because it is a swf designed site, any updates you do to your website will now no longer be indexed. So how will this not affect you?
Google spokesman said, “most users and websites won’t see any impact from this change.” Apple stopped supporting Flash when it introduced the iPhone on those devices and the company may have been credited as killing Flash. As we said above, fewer and fewer browsers have supported Flash. Google said “Flash is disabled by default in Chrome (starting in version 76), Microsoft Edge, and FireFox 69.”
The warning is simple despite Google trying to play-it-down that they too are not killing swf flash driven websites. But they really are, because if your website won’t be indexed. How can your meta data be updated on Google search with any changes you may make? Well, the answer is; it can’t. So, I’d encourage anyone with a flash site to begin porting their website towards js driven frameworks with css3, and html5 support.