The Searchable Swf

A big problem when using flash on a website has been seo. It was generally a bad idea to use flash for any main content or navigation on a site, search engines would not recognize it. Flash has always been a way to add movement to a site. Many websites took full advantage of this and went full flash. In the early days some would hide search engine keywords under a flash swf to get searched on. This would become an exploited technique and Google later frowned upon. Earlier this year, Adobe came out with a way for flash applications to allow text and links inside of the flash player to get index by search engines.

Adobe has created a special Flash Player that allows search engines to run through the application and translate the content into something search friendly. This being said, it still poses a problem for back linking. Since a flash site generally keeps a single URL during a single site visit, back linking to a particular page in the flash application is virtually impossible. A site might get index for the flash content, but it will still manage to have a hard time getting up in the search engines.

Probably the best rule to keep when using flash would be to use it wisely. Do not use flash navigation or full website. It should accent a page, not dominate it. Maybe one day flash will be fully searchable by search engines, but until then its safer to stay away from SEO Swf.

For more information on Adobe’s searchable swf, please check it out here.

For more information on Google’s searchable swf, please check it out here.