The goal of gotoAndLearnFlash is to have users find the Flash tutorials they want, and write their own reviews to let future readers of this site know whether the tutorial was really helpful or not. While my goal here is to find the best free online Flash tutorials the net has to offer, I simply don’t have the time to review each and every tutorial I come across. That is why I encourage users to check out the tutorials, come back and rate or review them for future readers.

Currently, there are only a few tutorials listed, but I try to add more and more when I can. The biggest hurdle is I really would like to review any tutorials that I post, but I simply don’t have the time. So, I’ve been posting some Flash tutorials without an editorial review in hopes that users will add their own reviews in the comments section. Better than a rating system, I believe a user review will help gauge whether the tutorial is really worth checking out. If you enjoy my tutorials, check out www.gotoandlearn.com to find more Flash tutorials from other authors that I found helpful.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Thanks in part to Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, Google has come up with new algorithms that better search and index Flash (.swf) files.

Basically, Google can now index any textual content in a Flash file (I was under the impression that it could always do that…). I would imagine this would be text blocks that haven’t been broken apart, which some designers do to apply animation effects. In other words, say you wanted a headline that came in one letter at a time (like a typewriter)…. each letter would be a seperate element, thus put together, it reads as a word, but Google would see it as the individual letters.

In addition to text blocks, Google can now track links to other pages. While things like anchor text and title tags cannot be attributed to these links, the fact that Google can now at least REACH these pages through Flash is huge!

Google still cannot index any image elements, or really anything other than text and urls, but this is still a really big step in getting Flash sites indexed (or even having Flash elements on a page support the page content).

Read the Google Webmasters Q and A about Flash indexing.