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Do search engines understand Flash?

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Last Updated: September 14, 2007 2:22 PM

Well-composed Flash animation can be visually stunning and might turn a Web page into a virtual work of art. Unfortunately, very few search engine spiders understand Flash.

This means that Flash-embedded page elements, including links and text, are invisible to many visiting spiders and won't be taken into consideration when the search engine determines if and how to rank the page. Web pages that feature substantial amounts of Flash animation will most likely only score mediocre rankings with Internet search engines, while entirely Flash-based pages might not be indexed at all. Submitting entirely or heavily Flash-animated pages to Internet search engines is usually futile.

If submitting pages that are partly Flash-animated, decent rankings might be achieved by optimizing the page's Meta and Title tags, adding well-composed and keyword-rich page copy, and using regular hyperlinks to connect the Web site's elements.