Today I had the pleasure of attending the SES Chicago “Organic Track” forum, “Sitemaps: Oversold, Misused or On The Money?“.

The panel was moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief for SearchEngineLand.com. The participants included Amanda Watlington, Vivek Pathak, Jeremy Clem, Manager, Natural Search, and Trevor Foucher of Google.

During the Q&A section of the forum, someone in the audience asked an off topic question about flash websites and flash files. The question was asked along the lines of “when will Google start doing a better job of indexing flash content?”

You get the point…

Anyway, Danny Sullivan chimed in right off the bat and said matter of fact “it will NEVER happen”. Sullivan went on to say that flash files are extremely unfriendly to search engines, something most of us already knew but loved to hear re-enforced, and that anyone using them was clearly heading in the wrong direction.

When Sullivan went to pull the forum back on topic, Trevor Foucher of Google jumped in with “plus, a lot of users can’t see flash, so we feel it isn’t user friendly either”. Which says to me that Google doesn’t like flash and will likely look down on it when it comes to grading a pages’ content for the SERP’s.

Can we put this to rest once and for all?

Enough with the flash hysteria.

-Eric Odom