hi friends, It is good news for all web designers who have designed websites in flash because google crawler can read and index flash content. I find the result in search engines . Result showed all data which was used in flash file.Technology improving day by day and becoming more user and designer friendly. Cheers & Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!!
Googlebot has been able to read portions of flash for some time now. It is only its ability to read images and all that kind of stuff that is limited (no links, etc). Text only can be read partialy, but not as good as HTML or PHP. This has been an improvement that has been in place since 2008. However, flash still is not good for SEO. Not by a long shot. Source.
DOnt get me wrong, Flash is awesome, it ads so much interactivity to a site, but yeah, the only good flash on a website is flash that has been delivered in small doses, and left keywords to be delivered in the HTML.
I Agree with you. I am also using flash in my websites but i do this in one limit because i like to create SEO friendly websites.
Don't get two excited... Flash is still total CRAP if you want your pages to rank. Google has been indexing Flash for years w/ their home grown indexer... About a year and a half ago Adobe gave the big 3 engines their specifications so that they can read Flash, but it still sucks and likely will for the next decade. I heard Matt Cutts say in person at Pubcon Dec 2008 that while they now have the specifications, it will be 10 years or more before Flash ranks even relatively well based on the content of the pages (it's pretty much 100% dependent on inbound links to rank) and that an equivalent HTML site will ALWAYS outrank the exact same content presented in Flash. Flash has too may short comings and issues. The engines - their crawlers, indexers, ranking algorithms, their index itself, their tools, etc. - are ALL built around the task of indexing HTML. They've been indexing HTML for over a decade. They are not built for indexing Flash. An entire site written in Flash gets indexed under a single URL. TERRIBLE from an SEO perspective. Imaging a 50 page site written in HTML. Each page gets a <title>, <h1>, <h2>, it's own targeted keyword phrase, it's own inbound links, it's own keyword density, etc. Building the equivalent site in Flash would be the same as taking the 50 pages of content and dumping it into your home page. The Flash gets ONE <title> no <h1>, no <h2>s, and you have 1 page essentially targeting 50 keyword phrases. TERRIBLE for SEO.... You just diluted your keyword density to 1/50th what it used to be. (not that keyword density is HUGE, but it is a ranking factor). Flash, even if it DOES rank because of it's inbound links, provides the user a terrible experience. Image a Flash site with pages 3-4 levels deep because of the navigation. If the content on a level 4 page WERE to actually rank, when the user clicks on the link in the SERPs, they are going to be sent to the Flash home page... Then the user has to click thru the entire site hunting for the page in the Flash presentation which contains the content they are looking for... They may NEVER find what brought them to the site. Until the search engines provide a way to link to the EXACT page within an Flash .swf that the user is looking for, it will continue to provide a bad user experience. The way it works to day, it's just as bad as allowing popup pages with no navigation to get indexed and rank. Bad idea IMO. You COULD maintain both an HTML and Flash version of the site, but why? Total waste. It's double the work to create a site... and double the work to maintain it going forward. Everytime you add content, change navigation, change the CSS, etc. of the HTML site, you need to go do the same in the Flash version. 99% of the Flash sites I've seen could be implemented in HTML and look identical. Most people implement sites in Flash because the designer/developer would rather work with Flash - it's cool... it's fun... - NOT because they want to take advantage of some feature that they can't implement in HTML but can implement in Flash. Flash has it's place. Use it to display an ad in a widget that appears as "part" of a page. But DON'T build entire sites in it. If you want to optimize your site so that they can actually be found and be competitive in the search engines, stay the hell away from Flash. If you don't care about being found in the search engines.
The bots can see any alternate text that you've included on images. Flash works well for humans, but not spiders I doubt that ever changes. On my site, our home page is almost completely flash....however people are not directed there by our SEO efforts.
Hi, Thats old news. Google is improved flesh indexing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
It is depend upon the designer how he can make S.E. friendly flash. Text is good option to use in layers than images in flash.
I agree with those that said they still avoid flash. It's only really good for online games and for portfolios of web designers. Something where you need an intense amount of graphics and razzle dazzle. It's not the best for information and most content.