Indexing Flash Sites?

[darrenw]

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I believe that I may have read somewhere that Google is now able to index Flash pages - and in fact the text at the bottom of this page seems to confirm this - swf is Flash, isn't it?

Does anyone know if Yahoo, MSN or AskJeeves also index Flash sites?

Thanks,
Darren.

[anonymous]

i'm very surprised to hear that too... good news for flash sites, although i'm still a little scepticle about the quality of its ability to index them I mean you hardly ever see flash sites appearing in search engine results do you... or maybe there just aren't many flash sites about.

[webvideo4u]

I still wouldn't recommend anyone having a pure Flash site if they're relying on organic seo

[Brendon]

Google have been able to follow links in SWF files for quite some time. If you do a filetype:swf "your keyword here" search on G, you'll see a complete listing of all the Flash files in your niche

Note that some Flash files also have text indexed; I don't know enough Flash to tell why, and I've never been interested enough in the technique to investigate. Perhaps a Flash whizz could fill us in?

[webvideo4u]

Google can spider Flash files but it remains questionable how much text you can realistically get spidered in comparison with a text based website.