Here it is, A no holds barred explanation of the relationship between Adobe Flash and SEO.

I’m going to show you what the big deal is, and how it will affect you if you’re using Adobe Flash on your website. I’ll shed some light on the difference between a site that is built entirely in Flash, and a site that houses some elements in Flash, and others in HTML. And more importantly, I’ll show you different ways you can still benefit from all the amazing things Flash can do to enhance the usability of your web property.

There is a lot of ground to cover so this will be broken down into bite sized chunks over the next two weeks. Once the entire series is completed, you’ll be able to download a complete copy of the ebook in its entirety.

So let’s dive right in…

Can Google Crawl Flash?

It wasn’t until earlier this year that Google announced their ability to crawl Adobe Flash. Up until that point, it was an area the search giant still struggled with a great deal. Search Engine Result pages (SERPs) came up with ugly attempts to index Flash that look more like junk than anything else. Result pages often times looked like this…

On June 30th Google published a blog post stating that Adobe had delivered Flash reading software that gave them the ability to read the text and links within Flash. Woohoo! Yeah, not so fast guys. It is going to take Google an “unknown amount of time” to untangle the mess before we begin seeing some good results from it. I wouldn’t expect anything decent for at least a year.

Also, keep in mind that this new addition to Google’s ability only allows them to crawl the text and links within your Flash. That means your images, videos, and other effects within the site will still be left in the dark. If you want Google to index your photos, you must get them out of Flash.

A second blog post was released 12 hours after the first and goes into a bit more detail regarding Google’s new capabilities. If your geek side is urging to come out, go ahead and give it a read. Its not all that bad really.

Testing To See If Your Flash Was Crawled

Here is a good test to see if Google has indexed the text in your Flash site. Find two sentences of text within a section of your Flash (preferably other than first page) and do a search for the end of the first sentence and beginning of the second. Basically what we’re looking for is a string of text that is going to be unique. Then, do this search in Google:

Site:yourdomain.com yourkeyword

So an example would be something like this if my sample text was ‘blue widgets. But green widgets’

Site:serpable.com blue widgets. But green widgets

When I put that line into Google, the page with that text should come up in the top three if not number one. Chances are, if it doesn’t, Google still hasn’t crawled your Flash site yet to its fullest potential.

If nothing shows up, give it some time. If you need something to be indexed soon and can’t wait, email me and we can discuss what your options might be.

Indexation and Ranking

In the next post of this series I’ll be taking a look at how to get a Flash website indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Be sure to check in or better yet, subscribe to the serpable feed so it will be delivered hot off the press!

Happy SERPing!

Levi