In August 2010 we presented a Daily Nugget about Flash and it's usability with Internet Explorer's 64-bit web browsers that is installed as the default browser in Windows 7. Today we're providing a follow up to that Nugget with new Flash developments that affect everyone.
As a recap, Adobe Flash does not work properly in any 64-bit web browser. All popular browsers are available in 64-bit versions, but Internet Explorer is the only one that comes installed and activated by default in Windows 7. Many non-technical internet users don't understand that IE 64-bit cannot run Flash. The result is a lot of user disappointment and seemingly non-functioning websites.
The obvious solution is to switch to IE 32-bit and not use any 64-bit browsers... thus losing the blazing internet speed that we all would love to experience.
It's been more than a year since this Flash problem appeared and Adobe still hasn't provided a permanent solution, even though they've issued scads of press releases stating they are working hard on it.
On different SEO fronts we've recently started to see newer websites created with Flash 10.1 and later appearing in Google's SERP. Well, we should clarify how we found them... we specifically went looking.
We routinely track a few jewelry catalog sites that were converted from normal HTML into Flash. The sites created with Flash 9 and below are still invisible to Google, but we do see SERP results for sites created using 10.1 and above.
Before you decide to start creating websites in Flash again, know that Google is indexing the images and the text it reads from within Flash 10.1, but the websites themselves are still poorly ranking in competitive markets. In fact, we had to search for specific domain names to see results. Normally we search for phrases like "jewelry stores town name" or "pandora jewelry town name" and can measure results. The Flash 10.1 sites are clearly missing from the first 5 pages of the SERP.
Our bottom line Gold Nugget for today is that Flash elements are still good for simple user enjoyment or to call attention to something. They should never be used for navigation linking and never as a container for all of your content. If you're serious about SEO, you need to avoid 100% Flash websites.
We'll check back again with this topic again sometime in the future with the latest developments.
