Is flash indexable now?

Hi, I have a customer who wants to do a flash site, but to my knowledge flash sites can not be index by google. However, I was doing a research of his competitors and there was one flash site that was index by google and it came up in some keyword terms. My question is. Is this site been cloak or is there a way google can get in to the flash movie and see the text?

Thanks.

Please let me know if this is the wrong section for this topic ?

 

u can use html page to display the flash and also add meta

 

Simple, the answer is yes : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Google index flash sites but you can help google to index it better if you optimize your flash and use more text than images, animations etc...

 

Tell you customer that if they want decent search engine rankings, flash is still not a good option. Although Google may now have technology to better read flash files, it is far from doing a good job of it. You would still be ignoring other search engines which is a horrible decision too. Trying to get good rankings for a flash website is like trying to get rankings for a website with very little content. It is possible, but you need many, many more links to establish relevancy for any good keywords. It would be an uphill battle.

As bohra mentioned, you can use html and flash together, but you would still want to double on navigation links. You would also have to be very careful that each flash page is it's own url. Many flash websites fit a lot of content all into one url which makes it very difficult for the search engines to find all that content.

Still I would not recommend flash to any website that wants search engine rankings.

 

Yes ... Even you can use Google anaytics for Flex(flash) based sites . Adobe is still working to fix all bugs ...

Flash now sounds good at google searches ...

 

Yes, I've noticed my flash files have been indexed from the past couple of years.

 

Thank you very much for the responses. Wow, this is new to me. I think it is great that flash movies can be index by search engines, at least by Google, That is. But as you say vansterdam, I think, the best bet still, is to make a HTML- Flash site. It would be easier to optimize and it will let me have more control over which keywords I choose.
This is what I originally propose my client but he tends to go for the whole flash thing. See what happens.

Thanks again.

 

Google is able to read Flash better that is the past. But not as good as it should be.
So, if your customers are converned about ranking well, they have to use flash, but not only flash. Mix flash with rich content in HTML.
BTW, if you think it, its surprising that Google is not really able to analyze well Flash.

 

Google is a search engine based on URLs so if you don't provide URLs that describe your flash content Google will never perfectly index your site. So I suggest that your flash updates your page URL using the #. Flex does that very well. You may also create permalinks thus your server can generate extra HTML behind the flash.

 

Yes, google already indexes flash like .swf, I have tried it

 

good stuff. But I still believe that standard pages have an advantage over websites that are entirely based on Flash.

 

Yes..now Google can index flash site..

 

yes, Google can index flash pages

 

Flash built pages are more search engine friendly at present than some years ago but from professional SE perspectives, they still are not the ideal forms of page creation because text based pages are the way to go.

 

Flash is now crawled by Google but does require a lot of SEO work to rank high. We have a few high-ranking Flash sites and to rank high they required a lot of backlinks, traffic, etc.

Good luck with everything!

-AS

 

Better than just using a flash site go for a hybrid with your hyperlinks and keywords embedded in in HTML text, using flash for the animated parts to keep real visitors interested.
Have a look at Dees fancy dress for an example. Here an animated carousel is used to grab the visitors attention but if flash is not installed the user still sees a complete website (the same as googlebot sees). This way you will get the best of both worlds great graphics a good looking site and one that should rank well.

 

hi,

Yes , now google is indexing flash website easily. so please referred the ref. link - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

 

Yes Google Indexes flash sites but still its algorithm has some limitations:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. Google currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

3. While google able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, google will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

But these limitations will be fixed soon by google.

 

google can index flash site

 

Google can but go with Flex if you get, they are 100% idexable and you can create websites using their platform.