Topic: Flash and indexing

[Perspective]

AFAIK google can't/doesn't decompile flash files to index the text. So what do flash websites do about being indexed?

A friend of mine just had a website made for her business, it's in flash (she doesn't know anything about web/technology). Now she needs a way for there to be some content to be indexed so the site will come up in search results.

Are there any meathods for this? I was thinking there might be a <no-flash> sort of thing (like the noscript tag for javascript) and the content could be indexed there, while most people who load the page would get the flash site.

any ideas?

[micah]

for starters, use the meta description field in the header. Google uses that as the default description for the site when it displays its results.

while there isn't a <noflash> HTML tag, best practice is to also provide a non-flash version of the site.  The best way to do this to put all the text you want google to see on the index page.  Then at the top of that page, put a one frame flash movie that has an action that forwards the user to another page (like, index2).  On that next page, post the flash version of the website.

so google will index the text version of the index page.  when a user clicks on googles link to the index page, if they have flash installed in their browser they will instantly beforward to index2 and view the flash movie of the site.

[Perspective]

Forwarding sounds like a good idea. I'll look into getting that set-up. Thanks.

[Mike]

Or just don't use flash for an entire page...

[micah]

Or just don't use flash for an entire page...

+1 

flash == pretty
pretty != SEO

[Perspective]

Or just don't use flash for an entire page...

Yeah, that was my initial reaction. Have an opening page in HTML with a link to the flash site. An auto-forward would be nice though