Up until recently web site crawlers (spiders) could only catalogue content on web pages developed in HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language). The reason for this is the content on these pages were in text, where as web sites built in Flash are all image based.
Flash based web sites are much beloved of clients and developers looking for a high fashion, image conscious web presence but in the past they have been penalised by poor organic search results.
According to Web Marketing Today, Adobe has agreed to provide proprietary code to Google and Yahoo to enable their spiders to catalogue these sites, but commentator Ross Dunn says HTML is still essential for those wishing to be well represented on search engines:
"...critical components can still be optimized only in HTML, not in Flash. These include heading tags, images and image tags, nofollow tags, etc. Moreover, when a Flash website is composed of only a single SWF file, page to page link popularity isn't possible nor is deep linking available. As a result, searchers always end up at the home page.
"Flash has made amazing progress and is far more search engine friendly than ever before. Unfortunately, it can't yet compete with a professionally optimized HTML website. The only exception would be when the Flash site has a vast number of links pointing to it or has little worthy competition."
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