Flash and SEO

[panderson321]

When I search the seomoz site for "flash and seo" I only see older articles, 2008.  Is there anything newer you can point me to for a current discussion on the impact on SEO of flash sites?

[Getz.pro]

Links I do not have at the moment, but here is what you need to consider.

a) is the Flash having to do with the content or navigation of the site, or just cool features not related.

a1) If so, does the Flash contain actual text which can be indexed by Google/Bing. If you just have images within your Flash, that will not help you much with SEO.

b) If your site is based on Flash, does it have an HTML equivalent?

c) Does your site rely on mobile browsing? iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) does not support Flash.

[Highland]

Google does try to spider Flash (or it did a few years ago) but it's not very optimal. What it does is look for text within the Flash file and pulls that out. The problem is, it ignores program code and lumps ALL text together. So if you have several pages of text in your Flash, you could wind up with one bulk content page instead of several content pages (which is bad SEO in general, let alone for end users)

Google doesn't execute code or read images. If you want to make sure Google indexes your content properly, offer an HTML only version.

[Ticket_King]

I think Richard put it best.  I will add that we have a small flash video on our site, but that's it.  Everything from navigation, content, etc, is HTML based.  From the SEOmoz conference in March we heard that things are pretty much the same: Google still doesn't do a great job with flash.