Just dropped in to say Hello!. I am a little bit perplexed that so many SEO professionals still think a site made entirely of Adobe Flash cannot be crawled or indexed by Google bot or for the matter any other search engines. So just to give you guys a heads up, according to the official Google blog the Google bot can index and crawl text, links, URLs, banners and images from anywhere in a compiled SWF file. This was almost two years back, so the algorithm must be dramatically increased by now. So why is it everybody so afraid of using Flash in their website? Beats me Any insight is helpful Read more : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html Thanks
Of course Google will crawl the site. but it won't be able to 'see' most of the content. To a googlebot, most flash sites are one page, with a page title and that's about it. And any 'improvements' in the algorithm aren't making much of a change in that.
"magda" is correct. And don't make the mistake of trying to compensate for your Flash by putting hidden text on the page either. Google has been known to drop sites from their index for doing that. See this for more info: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
@zupreme and @magda - if you would read his link, you would learn that Google can scan text inside flash sites as of two years ago which shows how far behind the times you are.
Ouch. Try to be more positive. I would also respectfully suggest that you seek alternate opinions. The company who owns a product (Google Search) has every incentive to downplay any negative points regarding their services. The reality is that within a SWF file you have two different types of graphic elements, "Vector and Raster". While Google can index Vector Text elements quite well (because they retain the actual "text" data) they cannot do so with Raster "text" elements (because they are no longer, strictly speaking, text at all - although they appear as such to a human being). Not having seen the OP's site I gave advice that was prudent under the circumstances. Hopefully the OP and others will benefit. Have a great day everyone!
Alternate opinions to Google's statement (not opinion) on what Google does?! Is this insane or just stupid? What negatives? He asked if they crawl Flash sites. They do. What's negative about that?
I know that Google say they can. I have seen no evidence that it works. I am not behind the times, I work on flash sites for big high street names everyday, and they remain as much a nightmare to SEO as they ever have been.
Guys thanks for your feedback. To tell you the truth I am doubtful too about what Google says in their blog, because initially my home page was entirely made up of flash and Google wasn't able crawl any links from it. It is only after when I put up a xml sitemap, Google was able to crawl my site. So I did two things to alleviate this situation. Firstly I put up a javascript that redirects visitors to an image-map and text based page if their browsers don't support flash 8. Secondly I put up some text content right below the flash object so that search engines would able to crawl it and follow the links. My homepage : http://www.todleho.com Share your ideas with me. Thanks