Can Google Index a Site Created Entirely in Flash

[LPfister]

Hello-

I was hoping that someone could guide me in the right direction of how to optimize for a site that is created entirely in Flash. Is there any code that I can place on the site to aid in my optimization? Any other tricks of the trade that I should know about? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[robotsdobetter]

To date the search engines cannot read/index Flash at all, so if it's nothing but Flash they'll just look at it like it's a web page with no content. This is why it's very important to have text on all of your web pages, preferably 500 words or more. There's no special code that will help you in SEO, well, you could say Meta tags, but who knows if they still even look at them anymore (And if they do, they don't count for much!).

[jfodale]

It depends on the size of the site, of course, but creating an HTML version of everything usually works well too.

[patc]

I believe Googlebot is able to read simple text and URLs (not dynamically generated and instigated by a GetURL respectively) within flash movies - I have seen spidering of an entirely flash site with a simple menu, which was the only exposure of the sites' content.

However, you are probably missing out on other engines, and the optimisation perhaps isn't that 'optimal' for google either way.

There is a way for detecting presence of a flash player, and in this regard I wouldn't have thought SEs consider it cloaking if you provide an optimised HTML based alternative with the SEs/primitive browser in mind. Yes, it's a ballache.

[Phil_Payne]

A Flash-only site?

Invisible to me - I refuse to install it, as do many corporates:

[eeye.com...]

And that was only November last year, the last so far of many vulnerabilities discovered in Flash. Why smeone would make a web site truly Flash-only is utterly beyong me.

[jimothy]

There is a way of indexing flash using PHP. You can have a "mirror" of the site running in PHP behind the flash.
To be really honest I did not come up with the idea, a good friend of mine did, and he does know his stuff, and it is tried and tested. I will forward this link to him, so he can bless you with the love.

[roodle]

I would forget trying to get somewhere in search engines with competely Flash sites. Waste of time. I made the mistake of building lovely full-on interactive flash stuff for clients, but when they later said they wanted to be found in the SERPs I quickly realised it wasn't gonna happen, unless it's a niche market.

Try a bit of <noscript> tags with optimized text. Has worked for me on Google for some years with one Flash site, though for any highly competitive area, again, it's probably a waste of time.

Flash is cool but it has it's drawbacks. I now recommend clients to have Flash "features" as opposed to complete Flash sites.