Flash

What's the best way to incorporate Flash, but make the site search engine friendly at the same time? Does Google read any of the flash files? Should you simply do a text only version of the home page?

 

i have a flash menu and google doesnt / cant crawl it
i had a page that took months to get indexed as that was the only link
i had to add a link else where to get it indexed

 

Yes, they get indexed . You can enter your search term in Google, and along with that search term, use the filetype operator and restrict your search to the file extension ".swf". This will search for your search term only in Macromedia Flash files. You should see [FLASH] just before each listing in the results page that is a Flash document.

Macromedia has a Flash Search Engine SDK (http://www.macromedia.com/software/.../search_engine/) that will give us just what we need. The SDK (Software Development Kit) includes an application named 'swf2html'. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application and as a static library for linked library implementation. For complete functionality, see the file Readme.htm included in the SDK.

 

Virginia,

It seems to me you've asked this same question twice. Shawn is going to be mad at you when he find out. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=6311

 

Flash doesn't validate does it? It could cause you problems, it depends how much flash you decide to use. I would probably say it's best to keep it in moderation, sites tend to look unprofessional when alot of flash is used anyway!

 

Depends who does the flash and what the site is for.