Flash and SEO

Any advances?

[Lobo]

Have there been any advances in search engines recognising Flash sites?

Been a couple of years since I did an entire site in Flash and wondered if anything had moved on in that direction.

I wondered if submitting an XML site map to google with relevant descriptions and titles was an option.

If anyone can offer advice I'd appreciate it

[mattclayb]

I have discovered cases where google has indexed textual content of flash websites, similar to how google indexes PDF documents.

Tn the search results the url is listed as [flash] like [pdf], and then a selection of the textual content from within the flash is displayed as the description.

From my experience this only seems to occur when the ONLY page content is flash, including no description meta tags.

The text within the flash also needs to be static embedded text.

Flash however is still way way way behind html in seo.

[mattclayb]

might I add, that if you are even remotely considering the possibility of SEO then keep well away from Flash!

[Lobo]

Yip that is always my first instinct, I guess nothing has changed...

I don't understand why this has not been cracked, so much flash out there just waiting to be seen...

You would think Adobe would at least give it a go, and produce their own FlashSearch search engine, tweak the program code to make it readable to their own flashbot and I would imagine you would have an instantly successful new search engine on the market...

[inbound]

If you want fancy headlines in fonts that are non-native then you should check out SIFR, it's the only SEO friendly flash thing I've seen.

[gabby]

If you want to really annoy your visitors please go ahead and add flash.

[vincevincevince]

If you've a site competing wth one of mine, then I advise you to put as much flash on it as possible.

More seriously, the only time I've seen good results from flash is where standard HTML content - the same content as the flash - is delivered to those without Flash installed. Suits the search engines and suits the user.

Whole-flash-sites fall down in particular because they don't assign a new url for each 'page'. You click 'about us' and you stay at the same URL. Search engines will never be able to figure out what kind of action script you've written to change the content, and how they can direct their user directly to the 'about us' page!

[oziman]

Typically for SEO you have to make a copy of the site in html and stick it between the <noscript> tags. It can just be the written text or whatever but from what I've seen in the SEO work I've done with flash sites it seems to do the trick.

o

[brucec]

What vincevincevince said is perfect: Make your site with HTML and add a Flash movie and you will be picked up by the Google/Yahoo spiders.

Don't make your web site all flash!

[Lobo]

Well this was in reference to a site a few years old that is entirely in Flash, I was thinking of changing it but wondered if any developments had taken place since the last time I was asked to do a complete flash site...

I guess not :-(