Search engines and Flash sites!
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Search engines and Flash sites!
Unfortunately I set up a site for someone using flash without researching first. As I learned search engines cannot crawl a flash site being that it is wrapped in a swf format. Crawlers are only seeing html saying you need flash to view site"not good". I been researching for days and came up with a robot.txt and sitemap.xml and added it to server. Doesn't seem to help. Ok my question? Is there anything else I can do? Or do I have to start over and build a html site with flash built in. I cannot believe all this technology and flash sites are left behind!
Thanks
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Just for a reply as I personally have no experience here beyond Google:
Search engines and Flash sites! - Google Search
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It's very difficult to optimise a Flash only site because it is seen as a single file although Google was supposed to be improving their technology to read more into Flash sites. What many companies do is have a Flash and an HTML version of their website, this is also useful to those on mobile devices or slow internet connections. The best thing you can do is create a welcome page with a note asking the user if they which the Flash version or the HTML version, Google will follow both but will now have an entire HTML version to cache and therefore you can optimise those set of pages so they get indexed properly. In most cases with Flash you really need to decide if using Flash is going to offer you visitors any benefit over a traditional fast loading HTML site.
