Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content
Historically, it has been difficult for search engines to extract content (text & links) from Flash (.swf) files. Subsequently, most Flash-based content on the web has been inaccessible to search results, with Flash based websites not receiving solid rankings in the search results.
Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content
From the Google website:
Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds, including self-contained Flash websites and Flash gadgets such as buttons or menus. This includes all textual content visible to the user. In addition, we can now find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. We’ll crawl and index this content in the same way that we crawl and index other content on your site – webmasters don’t need to take any special action.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=72746
SEO for Flash
Even though Google can now index text and links in Flash content, a site built entirely with Flash suffers a disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles for all of the pages within. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash page, thus creating indexable content. You can include Flash modules to embed with the HMTL so when a visitor requests the page, they’ll see Flash if they can handle it. Otherwise, a non-Flash visitor, such as a search engine, will be able to spider the site. If a user follows a search result onto one of the inner pages, they’ll get the same Flash experience because the movie is available on every page.
A few more SEO tips for using Flash modules within your website:
- Create descriptive useful page titles and meta descriptions.
- Embed the flash into HTML pages and use regular text links on the page if possible.
- Create textual representations of what is in the flash using noembed tags.
