Question

Topic: Website Critique

Status Of Google Reading Flash Sites?

Posted by Anonymous on 9/25/2008 at 5:51 PM ET 25 Points
Does anyone know the status of google being able to read flash sites?

Brad

Text-to-Art, Inc.
[URL deleted by staff]
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  • Posted by AdsValueBob on 9/26/2008 at 7:43 AM Member
    As I assume you already did, I performed a search for the latest information, however came up blank. I dug out an article dated 9/5/08 from my "near-worthless facts until I need them" collection. www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/pages/all-flash-websites-just-s...

    Bob
  • Posted on 9/26/2008 at 8:27 AM Member
    I highly recommend you do not do an entire site in flash.

    It can be done using separate SEO files and forms that the code "goes and gets" for the search engines to read. You basically build a ghost page into your code, but don't visualize it.

    Even some of the top SEO companies don't offer these types of services. Far easier and more cost efficient to use limited flash.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/26/2008 at 8:43 AM Member
    Here are some resources for you:
    https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml
    https://www.seobook.com/archives/001457.shtml
  • Posted by excellira on 9/26/2008 at 9:48 AM Member
    Interesting. Lately I've had a number of questions from clients on this very subject.

    Here is Matt Cutts take on NOSCRIPT from this page https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/jagger-2-update-info/ :

    "John Tourloukis, I’d be very careful if you’re thinking about stuffing things into the noscript tag. It doesn’t do much good in ranking, and if someone turns off JavaScript and sees a bunch of different text that wasn’t visible before, that can look bad."


    As for flash indexability:
    https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

    From Google Webmaster Central:
    https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing...
    "Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
    At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

    "Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements."


    The entire above article is worthwhile reading but make sure you look at the bottom section "Limitations" which explains some important issues.

    I hope this helps.

    -Greg
    Trinity Search Engine Marketing.
  • Posted on 10/4/2008 at 8:58 AM Accepted
    I manage the website of a top brand that was done entirely in flash. It's very easy for me to see what google has indexed of the site, title tags, meta tags and sporadic text from within the flash application (I have given up trying to get them to re-develop the site, even after a side by side coma prison with their competition's site done in good old html). Flash absolutely has it's place, as far as a site done entirely in flash DON'T DO IT!
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