Oh dear. While it’s good news that search engines are going to be able to cope with files and sites built in Adobe’s “Flash” format, I fear that people in B2B will use this news as an excuse to hang on to their ill-advised Flash sites, and even increase their use of the technology after impassioned pleas from designers.

Flash is the technology behind all those sites with spinning images and beautiful typography. It’s also the villain in those “splash” pages which have made searching for the “skip” button so second nature to most of us. It has its place in groovy multimedia sites, don’t get me wrong. But in business-to-business marketing, the object is to be found – and for that, Flash has never cut it, because search engines see text, not graphics. If your site has Flash stuff on it, that’ll explain why the content isn’t in Google. So I’m with this article from the Bruceclay.com blog, which advises: Don’t Build Your Web Site In Flash. Not for a long time.

As the article says, Flash is a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. You should be using your content and product/service offerings to do that.

It’s easy to snipe at what Google is doing to the advertising industry, but the more time goes on, the more that sniping sounds like you’ve been beaten. Soundly. In All Your Ads Belong To The Goog from the Bruceclay.com blog, Lisa Barone summarises it beuatifully: “It’s scary to see Google take complete control over the advertising world like this. Now, not only are they selling you ads, giving you tools to see how those ads convert and make them better, now they’re telling you where to put them. I know; why don’t you just hand Google your advertising budget and let them use it however they’d like? Oh wait. You’re doing that now. Carry on then.”