Using Adobe Flash For Your Web Site? Google Mobile Results Will Issue Searchers A Warning.

Flash, Adobe’s multimedia based website technology, is not a friend of mobile devices or search spiders and now Google has decided to step up their campaign against such sites using the technology.

Google announced that starting today, they will be issuing warnings to searchers when their algorithms detect that the website is not supported on the device they are using. For example, if you are using an Android device or iOS device and the search results show a listing of a site designed fully in Adobe Flash, Google may issue a warning that Flash is not supported with your device and encourage you to not visit the site.

The warning reads, “Uses Flash. May not work on your device. Try anyway | Learn more.”

I suspect many will not “try anyway” and visit an alternative result.

Google is highly recommending you try HTML5 instead and upgrade your sites to support it because they work in modern mobile devices and desktop browsers.

Google’s Keita Oda, Software Engineer, and Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst said, “fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices.” Google launched two new resources to help webmasters make the upgrade:

• Web Fundamentals: a curated source for modern best practices.
• Web Starter Kit: a starter framework supporting the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box.

This warning looks familiar because they started using it on mobile devices for faulty redirects.