Does Google still have a problem with Flash websites, or has that issue been resolved? Is there anything you can do (beside removing the Flash) to help Google find your pages?
As far as I know, no. Google is the reason why Flash is dying for content sites. Unless it's the interactivity that you need to triumph over other websites, stay away from Flash for sure.
last i heard google was still testing the ability to read flash. Over all I say use flash for perking up your site, not as the main platform of your site.
Though I have also heard that Google crawling flash content but I will suggest you to not go with that. Because practically I have not seen any impact of this.
Yep and agreed, Last time I heard that Google has been trying to crawl and read content within flash although this hasn't really been proven yet. As for using flash, yep use it to perk up your website, can be used on header such as banners or flash navigations.
Google bot is not crawling yet in flash web sites and not even in IFrames. As we are doing with flash web site I can suggest you to use flash as a web part rather then designing hole flash web site. You may do one thing more that do not target fully flashed web pages for keywords you can make another web page for targeting or can say fully optimize web page for seo only.
Use Flash elements however you please, but each time you put a video on your site you should always use a description to describe the content. All the search engines see as of right now is .SWF - They don't see the actual content provided inside. If you have an image of a united states flag on your page, google doesn't know what's in the image unless you tag it or put a description under it.
Google can read text within flash but it's still better to have HTML version of your website for usability purpose as well as for SEO.
Since when? Last I checked Google cannot crawl the text within flash, mainly because it is not a text based file, its a swf movie file.... For example GO to... http://waterlife.nfb.ca at the bottom, click the "ABOUT THE FILM" link You will see text explaining the film... This is basically what Google sees.... <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>WATERLIFE - NFB</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" /> <fb:share-button class="meta"> <meta name="medium" content="mult"/> <meta name="title" content="Waterlife"/> <meta name="description" content="The interactive story of the last great supply of fresh drinking water on Earth."/> <link rel="image_src" href="faceBook_Waterlife.jpg" /> <link rel="target_url" href="http://waterlife.nfb.ca"/> </fb:share-button> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/global.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/swfobject.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/swfaddress.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/swfaddress-optimizer.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/swffit.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var flashvars = { server: "http://waterlife2.nfb.ca/" }; var params = { menu: "false", allowfullscreen: "true", allowScriptAccess: "always", scale: "noscale" }; var attributes = { id: "flash", name: "flash" }; swfobject.embedSWF("http://waterlife2.nfb.ca/Preloader.swf", "flashcontent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0","expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes); swffit.fit("flash", 1036, 624); /* var so = new SWFObject("Preloader.swf", "flash", "100%", "100%", "9", "#000000"); so.addParam("scale", "noscale"); so.addParam("allowfullscreen", "true"); so.write("flashcontent"); */ </script> <script language="javascript"> var timerID = 0; timerID = setTimeout("writeDelayedImage()", 4000); function writeDelayedImage() { document.getElementById("delayedImage").innerHTML = '<img src="http://stats.nfb.ca/ntpagetag.gif?js=1&ntpg_lg=en&lc=http://waterlife.nfb.ca&ntpg_app=waterlife" height="1" width="1" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="">'; clearTimeout(timerID); } </script> <!-- BEGIN: Unica Page Tag --> <!-- Copyright 2004-2006 Unica Corporation. All rights reserved. --> <script type="text/javascript" > var ntpg_lg = 'en'; var ntpg_app = "waterlife"; </script> <script language="JavaScript" src="scripts/ntpagetag.js"></script> <noscript> <img src="http://stats.nfb.ca/ntpagetag.gif?js=0&ntpg_lg=en&ntpg_app=interactive" height="1" width="1" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt=""> </noscript> <!-- END: Unica Page Tag --> </head> <body> <div id="flashcontent"> <img src="assets/faceBook_Waterlife.jpg" alt="Waterlife" title="Waterlife: The interactive story of the last great supply of fresh drinking water on Earth." width="153" height="142" /> <img src="http://stats.nfb.ca/ntpagetag.gif?js=1&ntpg_lg=en&lc=http://waterlife.nfb.ca&ntpg_app=interactive&ev=interactive&ntpgi_project=waterlife" height="1" width="1" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt=""> <!-- <img src="http://stats.nfb.ca/ntpagetag.gif?js=1&ntpg_lg=en&lc=http://waterlife.nfb.ca&ntpg_app=waterlife" height="1" width="1" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt=""> --> </div> <div id="delayedImage"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-8867065-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script> </body> </html> HTML: You will not see that text anywhere in the file, what you will see is some metadata and other scripting, as well as reference to an swf file which contains the workings of the site, and Google at this point in time cannot access this file.
They learnt to crawl flash since this post - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html I am sure the algorithm is not perfect yet. But they should be able to index rudimentary text.
interesting, thanks for sharing. I knew they had been working on something, I didnt think they were implementing it yet.
Build more internal page's back link. Try not to build all your back links to main domain URL instead spread them to all your internal pages accordingly. Also, interlinking all your internal pages with appropriate keyword anchored and dofollow will help your internal pages to rank and indexed faster.