SE & Flash

[bogner]

Does anyone know how deep does a spider go into flash layers? I have a client that uses a flash navigation and I was wondering how and if is possible to have the flash nav w/ out using a nast tert navigtion...

Thank you in advance.

"bogner"

[rocknbil]

nast tert? :-P

I believe that Flash objects are still ignored by spiders just like images. There is talk of them parsing Flash but haven't heard anything serious, and it's probably not a priority.

[xsyntrix]

I'm pretty sure Google parses text and hyperlinks from .swf files. They also cache Flash files. :)

[whoisgregg]

You used to be able to do a "filetype:swf" search with keywords and actually get ranked results.... this appears to not currently be functional.

It was also "held to be true" for a time that text objects existing in the first frame would be parsed and contribute to the ranking for those words. The bottom line though has always remained the same: you can't depend on any search engine considering any part of a flash file for ranking or even indexing.

Think of it as a big block of javascript or css or a blank gif. ;)

hyperlinks from .swf files

I know wget follows anything it thinks is a link so it's certainly possible from a technical standpoint.

<edited for wide sweeping future predicting generalization />