The answer is still, NO!
However, Google recently announced that it now crawls and indexes Flash-based websites. Previous to this new feature if you had a self-contained Flash website you probably were not getting much traffic. Now you may see your site start to come up in search results.
The problem with using self-contained Flash websites is that there is still a BIG unknown about how to optimize your Flash (SWF) files for the search engines. And, Flash does not provide the proper tools to manage this new feature.
Best Practices
- Use Flash Only Were Needed – This means use it as an animation tool, even though it can do much more. Continue to us HTML for your content and navigation. At least until there are more guidelines around optimizing self-contained Flash sites.
- Do Not Use Javascript to Load Your Flash File – If you are using Flash as animation in your website and it does have some text in it that you want indexed, do not use Javascript to load the file. Straight from Google, “Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. If your webpage uses JavaScript to load a Flash file, we may not be able to discover and index the contents of that file.”
- Do Not Load Another File Into Your Flash File – Google does not follow files that are attached from your Flash File. From Google, “We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads another file – such as an HTML file, an XML file, or another SWF file – we may index the contents of those files, but we won’t consider that content to be part of the content in your Flash files.”
- Use sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) – This open-source project lets you replace text elements with Flash files. However, it keeps the text elements of the file in the HTML source.
Flash is an extremely powerful tool for animation and much, much more. For your website, just keep it simple and use Flash for animation only.
If you have questions about Flash or how to use it in your website please contact us.
