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I've got a website where just about all the content is in a flash movie. Is there anything I can do to improve my search engine ranking or make my content more indexable?

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    Rebuilt it in HTML + CSS + JS. :) Just kiding, but it would be definitely more search engine friendly.
    – Marco Demaio
    Commented Aug 11, 2010 at 11:18

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Yes you can. This article explains it fairly well.

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/1007/1/Flash-SEO-Best-Practice/Page1.html

My opinion on the matter (take it or leave it)
It is a real pain in the butt in my opinion. I would highly advise you to abandon an all-flash website. Take the time you would put into making it SEO-friendly and rebuild it using HTML.

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A few links on Flash SWF file indexability:

What Google has to say is:

Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files of all kinds, including self-contained Flash websites and Flash gadgets such as buttons or menus. This includes all textual content visible to the user. Google supports common JavaScript techniques. In addition, we can now find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. We'll crawl and index this content in the same way that we crawl and index other content on your site—you don't need to take any special action. However, we don't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all the content, Flash or otherwise.

I've never seen significant search traffic to Flash files.

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  • I can confirm that terms only inside a flash file will show up in Google searches though. I was amazed the first time I saw that. It is rare for this to be useful outside the "gee whiz it works!" factor though.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 4:25
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When a bot comes to your page you can display all the text contained in the flash instead of the flash. This way you will be able to select what text will be index and your page will have content associated to it.

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    Technically this is bad. You maybe flagged by Google if you display different content to them vs users.
    – Darryl Hein
    Commented Jul 12, 2010 at 21:27
  • -1 for 'cloaking'. See youtube.com/watch?v=kFOgZjbX9NU&feature=player_embedded. Cloaking is bad mmmkay. Note: if you don't know who Matt Cutts is, google him.
    – Evan Plaice
    Commented Jul 12, 2010 at 23:41
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    I'm thinking about it again, and that's indeed a bad idea. I'll just leave it as an exemple of what not to do.
    – HoLyVieR
    Commented Jul 13, 2010 at 0:01

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