I just discovered that someone on a Web Analytics discussion group misconstrued the recent Google announcement of better Flash search engine crawling support to mean it is now good to use Flash when developing web sites.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google’s move is welcome support for all the legacy Flash websites still in circulation, companies shouldn’t generally be deploying new sites made wholly using Flash.

What Google has announced is significant improvements to their ability to extract information, specifically text and links, from Flash objects. Despite what many are trying to read into this, Google already crawled and extracted this information from Flash only sites – this is not exactly new.

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A frequent Search Engine Optimization question is “how do search engines such as Google handle JavaScript and CSS?“

Historically, search engines processed web pages much like an old text video browser such as lynx. A search engine only “saw” what the simplest browser could display – simple html.

Much for this reason, search engine optimization consultants have long advocated that site developers keep site coding simple, avoid hiding navigation systems in JavaScript menus and the like.

Today the situation is more complex. Google and the other search engines will try to extract links from anything they can – from PDF files to JavaScript embedded in a web page. This process is not foolproof, however – a site should still avoid relying solely on a JavaScript based navigation system, especially when CSS is a better choice.

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There are occasions when some content on a web page just shouldn’t appear in search engines. The most frequent example is repeating header and footer details, such as site copyright information. This site uses the hcard format to provide contact information site visitors can save in a vcard for use with a PIM such as Thunderbird or Outlook. Yet some of the information required for a detailed vcard is not really appropriate for a search engine’s index. Historically, the best solution was to place such content on a page using JavaScript as search engines have avoided indexing JavaScript (they probably do analyze it). A JavaScript approach to keeping some page information out of search engines isn’t perfect – not all visitors will have JavaScript enabled.

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JavaScript drop-down menus are employed by many medium to large size web sites as primary navigation tool for site visitors. Drop-down menus offer many advantages. They are already familiar to computer uses who encounter them in almost all mainstream software. By collapsing when not needed, the menus take up little screen space – yet offer a wealth of options when the user hovers over one of the visible categories.

Technically, the use of JavaScript to code drop-down menus is problematic. While some code can be relegated to an external JavaScript file, much JavaScript usually ends up bloating HTML pages. In most cases, search engine crawlers are not able to follow the JavaScript navigation links, leading to poor search engine crawling and visibility.

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