Back in the day when websites were static, Flash seemed like a godsend piece of technology, where it saw an explosion in media-rich websites and content, where complex games could now be played directly in the browser itself. However, over the years, Flash has become more or a liability than an asset.So much so that companies like Google have started to phase out the tech from its browsers, but now it looks like the company is going one step further in nailing the coffin on Flash shut. In an announcement on its blog, Google has revealed that they will stop indexing websites that contain Flash from its search results.
According to Google, “Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won’t see any impact from this change.”
As Google states, the impact probably won’t be too big. In fact, for the most part, you might not even have browsed websites with Flash in recent times anyway. As to why Google has taken this long, it is possible that the company simply gave websites and developers more time to switch to HTML5 and more modern web-building tools.
Filed in . Read more about Adobe, Flash and Google. Source: webmasters.googleblog