In the past, web developers often had a choice: they could have a website that was fully search engine optimized and ranked near the top in search engine results, or they could have a site done in Flash that didn't appear in search results at all. Why was this the case? Many old search engine robots were not able to read any keywords or even content used on a Flash site. However, new advances in search robots are changing this.



Search engine robots must crawl through a website and examine the contents, metadata, tags, ALT text, title text, and more to determine how relevant to certain topics the website is. With a Flash site, however, all these older robots saw was the code to load the Flash plug-in. They could not read any of the actual content. While there were some ways that got partially around this problem, Flash sites never ranked as high as non-Flash sites, even when the Flash site was more relevant.

One thing that is changing this is the creation of Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Systems is actively working with search engines like Yahoo and Google to integrate Flash Player with their search engines. Once a business or individual submits their Flash site to the search engine, it will be ranked more or less where it would be if it were a non-Flash site. This allows search engines to rank fully dynamic websites better.

Google is already using Flash Player to rank Flash sites, and they have even been working to fine-tune the program to index content found in various Flash banners, buttons, and other parts of a Flash site. Their new search engine robot can store text found in these files and read them like it would read a standard HTML text, giving the site more content on which to be evaluated and ranked in search results. Google will read and index Flash files automatically once the content is added to your website. There's nothing special you have to do.

However, Google still cannot read images that include text, nor does it read and index FLV files (the main type of file used for videos on sites like YouTube). These files do not contain any true text elements, and therefore have nothing for a search engine robot to “read.” Google's search robots also can't read some types of Java. If your website loads your Flash through a Java Script, for example, the Flash files may not be read due to the robot's inability to handle Java.

Google may also not index any file within the Flash file that is considered an external resource. If the Flash file has an embedded SWF, XML, or HTML file, they will all be indexed separately, not as part of the Flash file. On the other hand, if the Flash file is contained within an HTML page, the entire page will be treated as one page, and the Flash file will be treated as a part of that page.

The final consideration regarding search engines and Flash is that most search bots have some difficulty handling Flash text that is written in a language that is bidirectional, like Hebrew.