Google and Flash

[IsItUPYet]

I have some clients who wish to have flash on their site i know that Google cannot read flash but as it is onle a small flash banner i added one. Does Google punish sites even if the flash is a banner or will Google accept it as a banner and ignore this?

[tigger]

I've seen lots of sites ranking well that have flash banners on them so that won't be a problem

[Quadrille]

Google simply ignores flash; treats it as invisible.

the only problem is if the flash takes a large chunk of your page, leaving little HTML for google to read.

A flash banner should be fine by Google - now you just have the visitors' tastes to worry about ;)

[JudgeJeffries]

I used to be totally neurotic about Flash and not one of my sites had it however my designer persuaded me to use a Flash banner and 10 sites later it seems to have made no difference to ranking etc.

[Powdork]

You can also use a simple trick to serve static content to people without Flash (and Google). Search for swfobject.

A sidenote- This is cloaking, so it is imprtant to make sure the meat of the content served is the same.

[rainborick]

Google indexes the text in .swf files and it can read complete URLs used for links embedded within them. But since .swf files are usually embedded within HTML files much like any other external files using tags like <object>, <embed>, or <iframe>, their PageRank score and anchor-text ranking strengths are minimal. On top of that, of course, they lack HTML's mark-up structure, so there's no facility for emphasing keywords within them either. You can see examples of Google indexing Flash file by searching for any common website word like "order" and adding the "filetype:swf" limiter.

So you need to consider .swf files just like any other <iframe>d documents in your SEO efforts if you use them to hold significant content rather than simply for styling. That is, you have to understand that these files are indexed separately from the parent HTML document in which they are embedded, and so the content within those .swf files will not be considered in ranking the parent HTML document. Similarly, and especially since Google is the only one of the top three search engines to index .swf files, you need to provide discrete HTML links to control the flow of PageRank/link popularity through your site.

[Powdork]

You also have to consider that should the .swf itself rank well, the link from the serps would go to the swf out of context of the html page.