Can the engines spider Flash sites?

[jamesf4218]

I heard that the search engines will soon be able to spider and index flash sites. Is this true? When will this happen?

[fathom]

Well... Yes! ;)

But the overall design of the site will determine how well it could be ranked.

1. If the site is entirely flash on say an single html page, then you only have a single page site, and this will be exceptionally difficult to rank on anything but the least competitive keyphrases.

2. If the sites has multiple flash "chucks" on different html pages, then each page could be indexed, but should the flash movie contain all of the links each page if "orphaned" from the others since googlebot can't read the Flash objects.

3. duplicate link elements will assist googlebot in determining the linkage between site pages.

4. the Flash objects should contain a tool tip (e.g. title="keyphrase") to represent the content of of the Flash movie.

5. It may also be worth while to place Flash objects inside a table adding the tool tip to the table element, or

6. if CSS2 are used -- use layers and placing a text string under the flash content.

7. a good <title></title> and even meta description and meta keyword which "might" reinforce the page add a bit of extra weight.

Having used these methods with Shockewave applets allowed pages to ranked exceptionally well on moderate targeted/competitive keyphrases.

[jamesf4218]

Thanks for your reply but I want to know if the engines will soon have the ability to index/spider Flash sites. I don't mean with little tricks to get round it, I mean that the engines can understand Flash itself and the text therein.

[fathom]

The answer still remains the same. Yes Flash sites can be spidered and indexed already, good ranking is a big problem though without same optimization.

If however, you mean can search engine parse the data within (text, images and other media) the Flash object, the answer is no, and this is unlikely to change in the near future.