Programmers can now stuff Flash programs with hundreds, or thousands, of links which won’t be readily viewable to the users. It doesn’t even need to be this extreme; adding a handful of links to a useful Flash widget or a hundred spam sites and you could be getting thousands of backlinks to your sites within days.

This is happening now and as it’s invisible to Google’s evaluators it’s bound to be very difficult for their anti-spam team to initially keep on top of. Could this see a return of the Google Bomb?

I don’t think so and this opens up the question as to what weight Flash sites will be given for their content and links. It’s still unclear how text will be able to be structured inside the swf files, if at all. Will we be able to add the equivalent of Title Tags and Header Tags, does it all count as Paragraph text, do links pass on any juice?

Personally I don’t think links found in Flash files will pass on much, if any, PR and that Google are far-sighted enough to anticipated this happening as it’s exactly the same as cloaking. Whilst more tests will have to be done to see what can be achieved in Flash I think rather than exploding like a bomb any spam will be contained within a smaller radius, thus, a Flashbang; which according to Wikipedia is not even a grenade at all!

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