I’m not saying exclusive use of Flash is for everyone, I’m just saying that for me, after years of use, it’s performing even better than the conventional ways I used before – with much more entertaining results. I’m learning new things all the time and I appreciate open discussion as your article demonstrates. Thanks again.

For example, you’re never going to have semantic markup inside most Flash files that indicates different page titles, headings, etc. Additionally, when Flash designers break text apart (a common task) any information about the words occurring in that text block is gone. And the single URL problem (which means you can’t have separate, optimized pages with most Flash sites) isn’t going away.

Could Google feasibly develop technology to work around these problems? It’s possible, but, in my opinion, quite unlikely. The reason: resources. Jumping through these hoops to detect page content and structure would spend precious system resources that Google wants to conserve to save costs. Only the most central websites (with the strongest link profiles) would justify spending that level of resources to index.

The new crawling developments have likely already helped Flash-driven websites – with newly-indexed text on the home page, for example, I expect many Flash sites are seeing increased traffic through the long tail. That’s a positive we shouldn’t ignore. I just have my reservations about it getting any better.