Google will stop indexing content with Flash
Content based on the Adobe Flash platform will no longer be indexed by the search engine. Already the most popular browsers have stopped displaying them by default.
Another step towards the end of Adobe Flash, the platform that allows the visualization of multimedia contents, the execution of advanced Internet applications and the streaming of audio and video that was the standard of the network in the 2000s. Google has indeed announced that will no longer index web pages that contain Adobe Flash or SWF files.
” In Web pages containing Flash content, Google Search will ignore Flash content “, says the blog post reported. ” Google Search will stop indexing autonomous SWF files “, all by the end of the year. Mountain View, then, specifies that Google has never indexed web pages entirely realized in Flash: with today’s announcement, it refers to the textual pages that include Flash content inside them. It will no longer take the latter into account when assessing the level of interest of a web page.
The news does not come unexpectedly, in consideration of the fact that the most popular web browsers, namely Chrome (starting from version 76), Microsoft Edge, FireFox 69 and Safari do not display Flash content as a default setting, and soon will not display them in no case. In July 2017, Adobe announced that support for Flash would cease by the end of 2020.
Over the last few years, Flash has been gradually abandoned more and more by web developers, especially after the advent of more modern, versatile, secure and efficient standards like HTML5. To date, the presence of Flash on browsers is mainly due to reasons of compatibility with old portals, which on many browsers should no longer work from the end of 2020.
Flash was the answer to those who, in the 2000s, complained of a certain immobility regarding the network, offering rich animations, multimedia contents and interaction. It was a prolific technology that inspired many new content creators on the web.
The Flash runtime, that is the software that serves to reproduce the contents realized on the Flash platform, has been installed 500 million times only in the second half of 2013. So Google is right when it opens with the words ” end of an era ” its blog post with the announcement we are reporting.
