Search Engines and Flash

Is it true that search engines will not search and retrieve full flash sites.

I am struggling to increase the page ranking on my site that was built with Swishmax and it is entirely flash based

Regards.

Jimbob

Search engines do have problems with flash, though they say they are improving the spiderability of flash sites. I still would not recommend doing a whole site in flash, you need content...text.

You said page ranking in your post, if you meant Pagerank, you can still build pagerank with a flash site, just getting decent positioning in the serps will be very tough.

Yeah, search engines can read flash to a real tiny degree - that is to say, it can parse URLs and SOME text based content in SOME flash files, but search engines really don't do anything useful with what info they do pull right now.

While I have had specific examples presented to me containing .swf files in the SERPs, I've never once, in my ENTIRE life, seen a .swf file come up in a REAL search that I've done (and I do at least 100 searches per day on any given day. When I'm actually working, hundreds of searches per day).

If you're running a flash website, just concentrate on building your link popularity. Focus on getting a ton of backlinks with your targeted anchor text.

If your site is flash work on metatags, link building(including relevancy). Page rank is becoming more and more important.

ho, useful for me.

No point spidering Flash sites because people should not be creating 100% flash websites. Its against the US (Section 508) and UK (DDA's Code of Practice 1st October 1999) law and European Recommendation of WAI Single A compliance. Embedded Flash for no- functional or alternative functions is ok (like Animation).

I am aware many flash only sites are used to host movie trailer sites and betting portals but they require visual use in the first place and would be exempt. For SEO resons the sites are often linked from a HTML page or are heavily back linked… Axe if you had search for "Coffee" Starbucks was a 100% Flash website that ranked number 1 (it no longer is due to Section 508 and DDA).... but its internal pages had not been spidered back then.

getting flash website listed is bit difficult task

A fully fledged flash site will have problems in certain search engines especially with ranking high and SEO.

If you have like a small flash movie on your home page you shouldn't have a problem.

Hi Jimbo, my search engine which is based in New Zealand is unable to find orindex anything that is stored within flash pages so most site designed using flash graphics don't get a very good score at all within our index because our webspider is unable to find a way to locate and index the text to sites designed using flash graphics will often haldly ever get found within our search engine.
Adding files with those aldeay running in your website and writing them in html will allow most web spiders to then find some keywords and content.

Search engines have problems to indexed the pages having flash contents.
That's why many sites are not using flash to get good SERPs.

Search engine didn't crawl easily the flash site but still you can optimize it by using javascript or html based as part of your site. Here are the two links on which you can check about Flash sEO.
http://www.seoconsultants.com/articles/2598/flash/
http://www.internet-marketing-analysts. ... _tutorial/

What you could do is make both a flash and HTML site. That could solve many SEO/Flash problems

yes you are right!
Flash in HTML will minimize the problem of flash with SEO.

Search engine will not crawl easily flash site. Use alternative content.

When the browser has Flash capability, the Javascript manipulates the page's document object model (DOM) to replace the alternative content with the Flash movie.

Search engine spiders don't run the Javascript, so they see and index the alternative content. The alternative content may contain links, heading, styled text, images - anything you can add to an ordinary HTML page.