I wish I could tell you the answer is simply yes or no, but, in fact, it is a little more difficult than that.

There has been a lot of discussion about Flash and search engine optimization. Google has made announcements that they have made improvements in their ability to index Flash movies on websites. In the past, there had been some limitations, but recently Google noted it is now able to work with external files, including XML, HTML and other Flash files.

While Google has made strides in indexing Flash content, Yahoo and Bing have limited ability to crawl the files to get content.

Who uses what search engine?

Recent studies by StatCounter  show that Google has about 80% of the search engine market share, while Bing has about 8.5%, and Yahoo! comes in at around 9.4% from United States visitors. Google’s dominance grows when stats include international visitors.

Flash Indexing Fallbacks

Some items to note about crawling Flash movies include:

• The content in the Flash file must be text-based in order to be rendered.
• Search engines don’t process most JavaScript. If your Flash movie is placed in the page with JavaScript and you provide alternate content beforehand, the search engines may not see your Flash movie.
• If a Flash movie contains multiple scenes or keyframes based on clicks, a user cannot get directly to that content from the search engine. For example, if you have a Flash-based site that contains a page about services that generates some search engine ranking, the user is going to have to go to the beginning of the Flash and figure out how to get to that page that contains the search terms that they are looking for, rather than going directly to the content. A good online example of this can be found by completing a search on Google for “intro.swf”. The first result is a Flash presentation with multiple slides. There is no way to get directly from the search engine results to the eighth page without having to click through all of the other pages.

A Search Engine Example

Check out the Google search for “nasa deep impact animation”. The second result brings up a Flash movie, as noted by the [FLASH] display in front of the result. The title is not helpful at all, as it contains the text “Loading Data” and then some ActionScript code. The description does give you a brief summary of what you might find in the movie.

Taking that same search term to Bing, the Flash file was located in the twentieth position, lacking a description and containing a very generic title.

Let’s take a peek at Yahoo! It returns the same results Bing did; however, in the sixth position.

To summarize, Flash and SEO compatibility are starting to play nice; however, Flash is still best used on a limited basis or for items that are not content and keyword rich. There are many other ways to improve search engine ranking, such as the use of optimized content for the HTML page title, meta tags and copy on the site.