Google and Flash

For all of those optimisers out there, here's a great search engine optimsation tip;

Google can read flash files. It's plastered on their guidelines that Google has the ability to crawl through and index flash files that are on your website, although we aren't exactly clear on how much flash they will trawl through before they give up, and obviously it will only matter to people who have included text within the flash images. The flash content, including links, can be crawled and indexed just like any other type of content which is great news for any SEO engineers and we're still excited about it a long while after finding out.

However, just because Google does to claim read these files doesn't make it alright to fill your whole website with them, it's still not very search engine optimisation friendly. A huge part of SEO and website optimisation is ensuring that there is enough copy on the site for search engines to read, so that they see the website as an authority site and therefore help the site attain good ranking results. Hiding content in flash, even if we think it's readable, will never be as safe as having simple textual content in basic HTML.

Some rich media formats still are not crawlable by Google, formats like Silverlight which include text within the images and not actual text fields. This also includes video files which should be added on the website in another format that is readable so the website doesn't lose out on content.

Here are some more search engine optimisation tips to help you learn about SEO and what will help your website.