It has long been the common phrase of SEO professionals!
"Search engines can't index or understand Flash content!"
But is this statement really true?
For some search engines maybe, but Google has been working with Adobe now for 2 years or so and they now claim that "almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file, can be indexed by Googlebot". Our friends at Google say the same about Urls in Flash files also.
However, is this truly enough to enable quality optimization of websites that are based on Flash?
In terms of quality search engine optimization, we don't just want our content to be indexed, we want it indexed for the right reasons. We want to guide crawlers & bots to the pages, images and other content that we wish to expose. In HTML terms this can be achieved by clever use of words within certain HTML tags. We can control the priority of pages through sitemaps, robots.txt files, meta data and link titles and text. However, influencing even Google to prioritise Flash content is still a challenge.
Furthermore, quality search engine optimization is not just about getting visitors to web pages, there is also a need to analyse and respond to on page events such as which links are being clicked on. Flash once again restricts our ability to truly add value in this area.
When looking at websites and pages that run predominantly through Adobe Flash technology, we must still consider these pitfalls and simply advise our clients accordingly. Just because Google boasts it can index the content, doesn't mean the content can be optimized effectively.