Flash & Search Engines

[jhewak]

I did a search re this and was surprised to find little.

DO engines/indexes find flash sites? Are flash sites invisible?. With so many gorgeous sites out there, I'm surprised, give the importance of SEO.

This seems a crtical issue. Any thoughts info?

Are there viable work-arounds?

Bewildered in Hamilton, ON.

[benbramz]

interesting topic. i found quite a bit after a bit of searching
Flash is not good for search engines, Most ofthe search engines have difficulty in parsing code from the complex DHTML coding of flash, Google has been recently reported on following links from flash .SWF files, We have seen google read text within a flash file and follow links from a flash file,

But yahoo dont read flash they are not sophisticated to do so, SImiliarly MSN, gigablast and lot of other search engines dont follow flash, Best bet is to avoid flash sites if you are planning to do search engine optimization,

Flash has always been a hinderance for search engines better avoid designing full sites with flash

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo...sh-search.html

This is interesting aswell
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com...les/flash.html
so google can index flash files....how effectivly i dunno.

[Rob]

A search of Webforumz.com would also have revealed this:-
Google can index flash