Q.  Full Flash-based sites are very popular as they provide fancy special effects. What is your opinion about 100% Flash sites? Can Google crawl these sites and index the contents of various movie clips used in the site? Some SEO experts believe that Google can decipher SWF files created by Flash and index the contents?
Kumar

Thanks for your question Kumar. This seems to be a topic that's of great interest to people as most professional SEO's have been telling people for some time that full Flash websites are certain death for getting into a search engine’s results page.

For those of you who don't know what Flash animation is, it’s a way of building websites that look visually stunning. It uses the concept of traditional animation in the sense that layers of animation are put over the top of each other to create movement. Flash is used a lot in banner advertising and some websites (a lot of car companies will build full Flash websites). If you would like to see an example of a Flash website check out http://incrediblehulk.marvel.com/.

Why do people build Flash sites?
Well as I mentioned before you can make Flash websites look amazing. Look at the Incredible Hulk website. It might not be the sort of movie you would go and see but you have to admit, the website looks stunning. Whilst these sites look great, it's always been an issue for search engines to get into these websites and crawl the content.

Previously the way around this was to create html pages of all your Flash pages, essentially creating two versions of the website. A Flash version for the looks and a html version for the search engines. As you can appreciate, this can be time consuming and very costly. (You can see that the Incredible Hulk website has done this. )

Can Google index Flash content?
In a nutshell the answer to this question is not yet, but the powers that be are working on it. Before we all go jumping for joy and start building full Flash websites lets put a little context into this. Adobe (the software company behind Flash) is currently working with major search engines to create a Flash search engine developers kit. This kit will essentially enable search engines to crawl and index Flash content. Currently this is still in the early stages of development so I wouldn't be jumping for joy just quite yet.

The Flash search engine developers kit also enables Flash developers to convert their Flash files into readable html files. This will be a very handy feature for many people with full Flash websites.

So what does all this mean?
Well, the way I see it is that until the major search engines come out with an announcement that they are indexing Flash files it will be up to Flash developers to license the Flash search engine developers kit and convert these Flash files into readable html files. This doesn't show that search engines are actually indexing Flash content, it just means there's an easier way of turning Flash files into something that's crawlable.

The future of Flash
With Web 2.0 technologies coming into play, the fact that search engines are quickly moving towards being able to index Flash files is very exciting. Could you imagine if Google took video footage of a street, added this to Google Streetview and was able to index all the names of the street signs, shopfronts and other info through this vision? Pretty exciting stuff moving into the future of search.

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