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.

How far along do you think it will be before Google (who is the leader at search and SEO) will figure out the best way to index Flash developed sites?

Its not like Flash has only been around for 5 minutes, right? I’m just ranting right now, but I’m seriously impressed with this article and for the reference to the other one mentioned above.

Maybe now I’ll be able to explain (in a clearer manner) how Flash is viable, but there must be more planning involved for clients that would like to be found and indexed by the search engines and don’t want to compromise delivery design.