Google, Adobe and Matt Cutts’ all placed announcements today regarding Google upgrading their spider to be able to index flash files more successfully.

As many of you know flash has always been a problem in SEO as Google could not see any of the content and links you worked so hard to generate. I’m happy to say this problem is coming to and end.

I recommend you read the official announcement on the Google Webmaster Blog but here are the most important points.

• Google will now crawl .SWF documents for text content and links. FLV documents will not be crawled as they rarely contain anything the spider could pick up. Smaller Flash files such as integrated menus or buttons will also be spidered.
• Only text and text based links can be indexed, images will not be indexed and image based buttons will have no anchor text attributed to them.
• In Flash only site Google will display the content as your snippet.
• Googlebot will still lack the ability to activate some JavaScript so any Flash executed inside this will not be crawled.
• Temporary hold on indexing certain languages inside flash, they note Hebrew and Arabic as examples.
• External resources will be indexed separately, not a big problem at all.

In my opinion this is a great step for Google and it means a lot for the interaction between design and SEO, we now have a lot more options open to us as including a portion of our content inside a Flash animation won’t offer cause a loss of SEO juice.

What do you guys think? Great step forwards or irrelevant in the bigger picture?