Flash and SEO

Flash is a wonderful tool for creating richly interactive web pages, however as far as SEO is concerned it is largely a black hole.

Certainly one the benfits of Flash from a design point of view is the freedom from the constraints of typical web design which can limit you do a modified grid structure, even with the wonderful tricks that CSS is capable of. However if too much of the content of a page is locked away in the .SWF file then there is very little for a search engine indexer to evaluate and decide on the theme or topic of that page. In any event it is often thought to be best practice to use NOEMBED tags to hide the operating data of the swf file from the crawlers. On the flipside a recent interview with Google's Dan Crow revealed that google does have the ability to extract the text from a Flash Movie and Index that so it may be beneficial not to hide the xml data that you may be using to load in the text to the Flash file itself.

Certainly it is best to avoid creating Flash only sites and also to provide a non Flash alternative to the site which while it may not be as visually impactful it will allow the site to be Indexed properly and offer full transparancy for the search engines to establish topics and themes, if not for the Flash pages, then at least for the site as a whole.

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