Google/SEs and Flash

[Karen]

I would love to know the answer to Wes's question from Fiona's post
"Free Site Viewer Needed (Text Only Viewer)". I've been wondering
about this for awhile now and I have a client who has an all-Flash
site that we need to make some decisions about. Wes's question:

"So whatever happened to all the rumors that Google can now read
images and even flash? It looks like the tools mentioned are still
not showing images (except for alt tags) or flash."

[Corey Creed]

Google made the "announcement" last summer. But as I said in my post
back then - http://www.thejunglemap.com/post/253 - it does not mean
flash is a good idea.

Plus, when you use a tool to see how search engines are seeing a web
page, that's not necessarily how Google actually sees it. After all,
it's a tool, not Google. And if you do use Google and look at their
cache of the page, it will probably not show exactly everything they
know about the page.

So if you want to know if Google is reading the flash on your site,
take a piece of text that is written in the flash and do a search for
it in Google. Narrow the search to just on that site by using the
site:yoursite.com command before the search phrase. Then you'll know.

But regardless, creating a site entirely of flash is a SEO nightmare
no matter how you slice it. Tell the client to change or don't take
the client. It's not worth it.

Corey

[Karen]

Thanks Corey. I checked several pages and Google is picking them up!