The Other Search Engines

**RootedOnTheWeb** · 05-19-2005, 01:12 AM

I read somewhere that building a site using a lot of flash creates problems for spiders and ultimately kills SEO. Can anyone verify or refute this theory? If it is true, can anyone give me some hints on how to avoid this problem if I want the best of both worlds?

I am about to start on a project that uses flash to create floating jpg slides but I'm needing the site to make the search engines happy at the same time. I would hate to find out, after the fact, that there is some truth to this theory that I read.

**myshtern** · 05-19-2005, 01:27 AM

Crawlers cant recognize anything with flash.

**chrishirst** · 05-19-2005, 04:27 AM

Google does read some text in flash files depending on how the flash is set up but don't expect to rank on the strength of it.

You can add text to the <object> tag after the nested <embed> (For NS) and in theory UAs that do not handle the <object> should render the text.

**havey** · 11-20-2005, 08:25 PM

I have had great success with flash, i have a totally 100% flash site that fluxes from 1 to 5 in the major search engines under competitive terms. I found that by repeating the meta tags as hidden words and whilst applying text properties to key influencers, things work great, I am very legit about meta tags and therefor the hidden words. I find it easy to maintain the top spots under key terms for different pages. keep in mind that as mentioned, google does read some types of flash text, so i'm synergising with key term text from the movie, I always make sure i have the ' <!-- urls in movie ' tag in the source and i can specify different page(s) or not page(s) that can be obtained in the movie. I like the control and the speed of not having to copywrite stuff out so the ratios are within. I also like the ability to feed the spiders from different technologies on the same page, i find it beneficial. Thats my two cents....

Hope someone finds this helpful!