Flash & SEO

[whoknows361]

Hi, I'm relatively new to the SEO section of this site.. Does anyone have any advice or links to some usable info regarding full flash sites & SEO...

Thanks

Jonathan

 

[trollacious]

Do a Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flash+and+search+engines

Lee

 

[TamedTech]

I think 'Flash' is generaly regarded as a swear word in the SEO community. ;-)

Rob

 

[jstreich]

Google is one of the few who do spider flash files. A lot of search engines don't. In general, don't use flash for text content, unless providing a non-flash version. There are other reasons not to use a full flash page, but the call is yours.

[plug=shameless]

http://game-master.us/phpx-3.4.0/

[/plug]

 

[TamedTech]

Google bots trawl the text content from a flash file? really?

Thats interesting.

Rob

 

[feherke]

Hi

Google bots trawl the text content from a flash file? really?

Apparently yes, really.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/flash.html

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[TamedTech]

Wow thats impressive... *ponders on whether he should now develope in flash*... *gets the sense slapped back into him and decides he had better not* lol

Rob

 

[Foamcow]

More recent versions of Flash are quite accessible to search engine crawlers, mainly Google but I have a feeling others do, or soon will, follow suit.

The main SEO issue with using Flash to add content to a site is that although the text gets indexed it has no context. The Search engine doesn't know what's a heading, what's a link, what's a paragraph etc. Consequently it cannot properly "weight" your content.

If you want a demo of why Flash isn't great then try the Macromedia/Adobe Flash Exchange. Bloody infuriating, and it could have been done so much more efficiently with plain old HTML.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[feherke]

Hi

I am curious about how long will search engines index Flash. I see this as a huge possibility of keyword flooding, because the Flash file could contain any amount of hidden text.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[Foamcow]

And I am sure that the search engines bear that in mind when applying weighting to Flash content. See my earlier comment.

Basically they will see that it's there but perhaps not give the text it's full importance.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[TamedTech]

I'd agree with Cow on this one.

I'm sure its perhaps food for the future, with the likes of FLEX comming into play then i'm sure flash driven RIA will start to become more popular.

They'll have to start looking for some alternative methods of indexing the conent of a flash file.

Rob