SEO For Sites Using Flash...Help

[niky]

I have been asked to help with a site that is using some flash. Another issue with the site is that each page size is over 100K almost 175K. What do I need to be concered with as far SEO goes? Does Flash really have that much of a negitive effect on site SEO? There are still alot of HTML content and text. Please advise.
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[accelerator]

Pure flash sites are pretty poor for SEO, but it sounds like you have Flash files embedded in html pages which at least allows you to SEO the page on the basis of the html. Flash and image files embedded on the page should have as small a file size as possible and other than that its similar to SEO'ing normal html pages. I try and use a significant amount of text content with a sprinking of keyphrases .

Rgds

 

[Arleigh]

I heard from google news that google learns how to crawl flash.

Here's the link: googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

 

[itrends]

I heard from google news that google learns how to crawl flash.

Here's the link: googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

yes, they can now crawl flash, but its not even as prominent as the relevance they give to PDF files as yet. Flash files are a great way to spam due to their on and off stage structure, library elements etc. At the moment, you wont be seeing any flash things at the top of the search engines unless they are really trusted and linked well. We are on the way there, but not there yet.

If your flash is on multiple pages, then yes, optimise the pages with SEO that contain the flash. However remember the site wont work on iphone, may not work for their customers (depending on market, for example, old government or people using computers with no option to install the latest version of flash due to admin rights etc).

Personally, I started my career as a Flash developer back on Flash 2 many years ago. Now I don't use it for anything apart from videos and show reels. If you can get your client to switch out of flash I would. There are few compelling reasons to stay with it for an entire website these days instead of just elements of it such as videos, banners, miniture apps, widgets etc.

Probably doesn't help but ho hum.